The Ballad of Dingus Magee

by David Markson

  “It’s only—” Hoke cut the man off without intending to, the exclamation voicing itself. And then he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Sixteen?” he asked hesitantly. “You mean counting the one in the lean-to, nacherly. You don’t mean the sum total of them squaws is—”

  “Jest what I said. Sixteen and one, which if’n you know how to add better’n you know how to git dressed, comes out to—”

  But Hoke had already stopped listening. He had closed his eyes also. “Seventeen?” he moaned. “Seventeen?” Finally he faced it again, not able not to. “But jest tell me slow,” he said. “Down amongst the old men, you dint maybe notice one of them chewing on a nice appetizing boiled wood rat, sort offer nourishment betwixt meals? Or if’n he ain’t hungry at the moment, then doubtless he’s still wearing a expensive derby hat anyways, and—”

  “Well, yair, come to think on it I did see one with a derby, but what is—”

  “Nothing,” Hoke said. “Nothing at all.” His eyes were shut again, and his head was lowered. “Excepting it’ll be at least twenty hours now, or anyways that’s what it took him the last time when they was camped up to Fronteras, and I don’t reckon there’s gonter be none of them let us cut it no shorter neither, not until they all durned sure git their belly-buttons squished out, so—”

  But he was not being understood, evidently. Or perhaps he had mumbled even more than he realized, slumped against a rock and not even caring, not for the moment. “Dean Goose?” he heard Belle shouting at him. And then she was shaking him once more too. “Because he’s the greatest what? Who? Now what the blazes kind of word is—”

  But this time he didn’t answer at all, already banging his head against the boulder behind him where he sat, quite hard, although quite deliberately also, in that profoundly impotent, ponderous rhythm of absolute and unmitigable frustration, of futility beyond hope. They had to restrain him physically.

  And he was right, because it was to be the twenty hours indeed, give or take an apparent meal or two, and by then Captain Fiedler and his troopers would be long departed for Yerkey’s Hole. But there would be another problem then too. Because it had been approximately six o’clock in the morning when it commenced, and at dusk, at twilight, it was only the twelfth squaw who was emerging from the tepee, the thirteenth who was entering. So they knew it would be under cover of darkness that it would cease. “Or when the damned thing just falls off him altogether,” Belle said.

  So when (he next morning came and the Indians were furtively gone at that, and the buckboard at the same time, without there having been a single sound for Belle or Hoke to hear, without a trace now either, there was only one boon, one saving grace. There still remained only the one direction for him to have taken with his burden. At the crack of dawn, and with the further benison of well-rested horses, they were storming after him again.

  “And I’m even almost glad,” Belle said. “I almost am. Because this time I’m gonter have less mercy than a aggravated rattlesnake. I ain’t even gonter kill him now, not right off. I’m jest gonter bury the little pee-drinker up to his neck Apache-style and prop his mouth open with a stick and let the ants do it. As a matter of fact I’ll sell tickets.”

  Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.

  They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”

  Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge

  the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”

  They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”

  So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:

  “Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”

  “And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”

  “Yet it frightens me at times, the extent of our obsession. Why, even that young girl these people are following, would you believe that even she reminded me of him slightly?”

  “Oh, but by now he must be far too manly to resemble any young lady—”

  “Of course, it was only illusion. But I’ve longed for him so deeply, so deeply—”

  “I too, I too!”

  “Well, shall we move on, Miss Youngblood?”

  “Let’s, Miss Grimshaw.”

  Hoke strolled back to the surrey.

  Three hours later it happened. Afterward, Hoke would find it difficult to remember how, since he was never aware of the exact point at which logic ceased and the other, the intuitive, took hold.

  Because he had been squinting ahead at the abandoned farmhouse for some time before it did. They were going fast also, passing only the first of the once-cultivated fields in fact, and there were no signs at all, nothing to indicate that Dingus had even taken this same road, let alone might have stopped. Yet suddenly Hoke knew, felt it even before realizing that he felt anything at all, because his left hand had already lifted involuntarily to obstruct Belle’s right, staying the whip. “Hang it,” she demanded, “now what the—?”

  And then it must have been in his face too, the same certainty, although he still could not have explained, nor did he even glance toward her. But somehow there was contagion in it, in his posture alone perhaps, because Belle slowed the team at once. The house itself was roughly a hundred yards off the road, the gutted barn beyond that, and they were only now abreast of both. “What?” she whispered. “Do you see—?”

  They went another thirty or forty yards before they stopped completely, and after that several moments elapsed in which neither of them moved, in which only the horses snorted and heaved in their traces. Belle was clutching her shotgun. A single jay swooped by in the heat, in the hot bright calm afternoon glare.

  Then Hoke was running. And this too, this without question now was instinct, some queer spontaneous impulse beyond thought, because still he had not seen him yet at all—had bolted from the surrey and was sprinting across the eroded ancient plowditches and had actually covered one third of the distance to the house before he did, before Dingus appeared. Dingus still wore the red dress, although without the bonnet now, without the pillow as well. He had emerged leisurely, carrying a shovel, strolling toward the barn.

  And then perhaps Hoke was thinking again at last,
had begun to think, to remember, the lost money, rewards gained and stolen and re-established and lost again, frustration that seeped to the deepest marrow of his bones, the aggregate affront to his soul itself. Perhaps he was, because he told himself, “Yair, but he’s kilt now, at last he’s kilt and I kin get some peace.” But there remained something scarcely rational about him at the same time, even then, since he did not shoot but merely continued to run, if not quite without reason then recklessly at the very least since the furrowed earth had begun to give beneath his boots now, was crumbling with every stride so that he slipped and flailed and almost fell more than once. But he was lucky too. Dingus himself had still failed to notice him, still strolled there casually.

  Then Hoke saw Dingus see him. And still he ran, heedless, the Smith and Wesson cocked in his fist now but with that still not raised for use yet either, toward where the other had abruptly whirled, where Dingus himself now stood likewise without firing or possibly even unarmed since he made no move to withdraw a weapon from his garments, from the red frills. Probably it was incredulity more than surprise which held him, momentary incapacity at the sight of Hoke in a dress of his own and with the irrationality patent in his very headlong attitude itself, as he stumbled and tripped yet came on maniacally like some infuriated hellbent mad scarecrow and still not firing but worse, looking as if he did not intend to fire at all but instead would obliterate Dingus through the sheer lunatic inertia of the rush alone. Hoke plunged on as if to run right over him.

  Dingus threw the shovel. He was at last turning to flee then, however, so that Hoke did not have to swerve or even falter as the ponderous spinning missile shot wildly past his ear. Dingus darted back toward the house, his skirts sailing. Hoke was less than a dozen strides behind him.

  He had closed half of that gap when Dingus disappeared as if swallowed by the earth itself.

  Hoke pitched onto his face. In less than the duration of a blink against the sun, against the flung dirt from his heels, miraculously, Dingus was gone, Hoke was absolutely alone in the field.

  But Hoke was truly thinking again now after all. Or perhaps not, perhaps this too was intuition, since it came so quickly that even bafflement was precluded for more than the first fleeting instant and after that he was up and plunging onward as before. “Because it’s jest a well,” he told himself and it was, although the mortared stones that had once encircled it had crumbled away and lay now scattered some distance beyond the pit itself. It was not wide, not four feet across. It was not deep either, clogged with earth and debris. From perhaps eight feet down Dingus was gaping wide-eyed, truly astonished—and at his own predicament rather than at the sight of Hoke now—but with his hands already braced against the shaft at his either side and posed as if to defy gravity and human capability and his own bewilderment at once, as if set to sprint back up and out again. “Now Hoke,” he said. “Now Hoke—”

  Perhaps Hoke heard Belle also then, the single prohibitive outcry from somewhere behind him as she hastened across the field herself. Hoke was panting, and his chest filled and fell, but he did not wait. He did not even listen.

  Steadying the Smith and Wesson in both hands, aiming with infinite deliberation, Hoke emptied all charged chambers into the narrow well.

  The shots banged and echoed in the shaft, reverberating out across the low hills, repeating fitfully. Hoke Birdsill filled his lungs hungrily with the sweet warm air, with the pure cleansing taste of exoneration at last, of release. He did not look; there could scarcely be less need. With his shoulders squared as if for the first time in decades, unabashed by even the dress now, he strode back to meet Belle.

  She had stopped some yards away. Nor did she move now, facing him with a kind of grim, constrained ferocity as he approached. Finally, wearily, she sobbed once. “Find it,” she said.

  “What’s that, Belle?”

  “What we came after, you banana-head. The safe. My money. You can use that shovel he ought to have brained you with. It shouldn’t take you more than eight or ten months to dig up every square foot of ground out here that he might have picked to—”

  “But—”

  She got around to hitting him then, a response he was growing accustomed to. He went down stifflegged, precisely as he had the last time, save with no wall to slump against. It didn’t hurt. He sat forlornly for a moment or two just watching while she herself gazed stolidly about, wishing remotely that he were back in Yerkey’s Hole with young Fiedler and his womenless troopers. The captain seemed intelligent, the last sort to be engulfed in such sexual maelstroms. Hoke wished advice.

  “All right,” Belle was saying at last, “maybe we’ll have some luck. Maybe we’ll find fresh dirt, if the rat-holing little exhibitionist didn’t have time to disguise it proper.”

  “I were digging up graves and making them look ordinary again when I weren’t but eight years old,” the voice informed them then, distantly, muffled and hollow yet hideously, sickeningly familiar. “You kin poke around from now ‘til Doomsday and you ain’t gonter find it, not unless I get drugged up out’n here first.”

  Slack-jawed, Hoke had sprung to his hands and knees. This time when she hit him it was only out of relief.

  “Get a ladder,” she told him disgustedly. “There must be one in the barn. If you can find the barn.”

  “And git me some new boots,” the voice contributed. “You mule-sniffing blind cockroach, you done put a leak in the toe of one of’em—”

  It was a cemetery in actual fact, roughly a quarter of a mile beyond the barn itself, where four rotted wood crosses marked the remains of the family whose farm it was, or had been. And he was right. The grave he had contrived for the trunk was identical with the others, undiscernible as new.

  Belle stood above him with the shotgun while he performed the excavation, although Hoke had to help with the lifting. “But I weren’t never very exceptional at physical doings,” Dingus said. When they finished hoisting it aboard the surrey he turned to grin at them affably.

  “Sort of a shame you caught up so quick,” he decided, “since it would of nacherly been a even pleasanter joke if’n I dint return it fer a week or so, like I planned. Oh well, it were enjoyable anyways. But seeing as how it’s terminated, I’ll jest mosey on along then, I reckon—”

  “Say your prayers,” Belle told him.

  “Aw now, Belle, you’re smiling when you say that, I reckon—”

  “I’ll give you three minutes, twerp.”

  “But—”

  Dingus studied her dubiously, then looked to Hoke instead, although Hoke had hardly anything more comforting to offer. In fact he had begun to nibble his mustache in anticipation, all the promise renewed again despite its brief debacle. He was even eyeing the shotgun greedily.

  Belle merely gazed at him askance.

  “Aw, shucks now,” Hoke pleaded, “them durned forty-fours jest weren’t never worth much fer accuracy to start with. But if’n I had a chance with that there scattershooter— especially it still being me he done give the heartache to fer the longest spell. On top of which I could get them rewards again, and—”

  “We’ll both do it,” Belle decided abruptly. “Why, sure. A gentleman and a lady planning to get spliced, they ought to start sharing their satisfactions early anyways—”

  “Married?” Dingus popped back into the conversation eagerly. “Well, say now, let me be the first to—”

  “You’d put a curse on it,” Belle said. “And that’s a minute gone now. You better get to praying, I reckon.”

  “Oh, I weren’t never the praying sort,” Dingus went on undeterred. “Jest sort of a old Emersonian, were all. But lookie here, I ain’t truly a bad nipper at heart. Matter of fact I doubtless wouldn’t of never wound up the way I done, if’n I’d had a mother to guide me in this life. And jest to show you there’s no hard feelings—why, here, I’d be obliged if’n I could give you a wedding present. It’s—”

  The shotgun lifted threateningly as Dingus fumbled in his ski
rts, but it was only a watch. “Don’t keep time too hot,” he admitted, “sort of antique. But it’s all engraved right smartly too. Here, what it says, it’s ‘To my darling Ding, he rings the bell.’ It were my—”

  “What?”

  Belle snatched the object from his hand. Then, inexplicably, staring at it, she turned livid. “Why, you immoral, dirty-livered skunk, where’d you get this? You even went and stole this somewheres too, didn’t you? Well, hang it all, that’s the end now, the absolute mother-loving end. Because if—”

  “Huh?” Dingus backed off more in perplexity than protest as she glared at him. “Now confound it, Belle, I never done stole it neither. Like I jest started to remark, that watch belong to—”

  “Lissen, you lying-mouthed little pussy-poacher, I gave this identical timepiece to somebody exactly twenty years ago, before the ornery polecat went and lost me to a white slaver in a faro game and started me on the road to ruin. Here, where it says he rings the bell, it was supposed to say Belle, with an e, but the jeweler made a mistake. From me to him, my first husband. And Ding was short for—”

  “Dilinghaus? You? You done give that watch to—”

  “What? Dilinghaus, sure. Of course. But how the thun-deration would you know that, you conniving little—”