Ghost Town: A Novel (17 page)

Shet up, yu yellabellied cyclops,’n gimme room! the bald man roars. He stands there before the bespectacled dealer, legs apart and leaning on his pegleg, shoulders tensed, elbows out, hands hovering an inch from his gunbutts. I’m callin yer bluff, yu flim-flammin cartload a hossshit!

A hole opens up explosively in the bald man’s chest like a post has been driven through it, kicking him back into the crowd, the dealer having calmly drawn, fired, and reholstered without even interrupting his steady two-handed shuffle of the cards. He sets the deck down and spreads his plump palms to either side as though to say: Any other sucker here care to try his luck?

He makes certain his sheriffs badge is in plain view, tugs at the brim of his hat, hitches his gunbelt, and steps into the well-lit space just abruptly vacated by the peglegged man with the tattooed hair. He picks up the fallen chair, watching the dealer closely, and sets it down in front of the blackjack table but remains standing. I’m askin yu t’return me back my prizner, he says quietly. He has a hunch about the dealer now, something he grows more convinced of the longer he stands there studying him. She warnt a legal bet. Yu knowed thet. I may hafta close this entaprize down.

His weedy ex-deputy with the busted arm leans close to the dealer, who seems, though his thick lips do not move, to whisper something in his crumpled ear. He sez he dont spect thet’ll happen, says the ex-deputy out the side of his mouth. Behind the mountainous fat man, the revolving schoolmarm’s white knees rise into view like a pair of expressionless stocking-capped puppets, then fall into curtained obscurity, over and over, but he steels himself to pay them no heed, and to ignore as well her burning gaze, for now he must think purely on one thing and one thing only. He sez ifn yu want back thet renegade hoss thief, yu should oughter set yerself down’n play him a hand fer her.

Caint. Aint got no poke. Yes, he’s sure of it now. It’s why he sits so still. Listening. To everything. His ears thumbing the least sound the way his pink-tipped sandpapered fingers caress the cards. Behind those blue spectacles, the man is blind.

Well whut about yer boots? suggests the ex-deputy. Or yer weepons? He shakes his head. The ex-deputy whispers something in the fat man’s ear, then tips his own ear close to attend to the reply. Well awright, he sez. Yer life then, he sez. Yer’n fer her’n.

Hunh. Shore, he shrugs, and sits down on the edge of the chair to get his voice into the right position. Aint wuth a plug nickel nohow. A flicker of amusement seems to cross the fat man’s face, the reawakened cards fluttering between his hands like a caged titmouse, or a feeding hummingbird. He removes his spurs so they will not betray him, and then, leaving his voice behind, rises silently from the chair to slip around behind the dealer. Reglar five-card stud, his voice says. Face up. Dont want nuthin hid. The dealer offers the deck toward the chair. No cut, mister. Jest dole em out. The room has fallen deadly silent as he circles round, nothing to be heard but the creaking and ticking of the wheel of fortune, all murmurs stilled, which may be perplexing the fat man, though he gives no sign of it. With barely a visible movement, he deals the empty chair a jack and himself a king. I reckon yu’re tryin t’tell me sumthin, his voice says from the chair, keeping up the patter to cover his movements. Something an old deerhunter once taught him as a way of confusing his prey. It was a simple trick and so natural that, once he learned it, he was amazed he had not always known how to do it. But a pair a these here young blades’ll beat a sucked-out ole bulldog any day, his voice adds cockily when a second jack falls, a second king of course immediately following on. Uh-oh, says his voice. Damn my luck. Pears I’ll require a third one a them dandies jest t’stay in this shootout. Which he gets, it in turn topped by a third king. He is behind the dealer now, gazing down upon his bubbly mound of glowing pate. Well would yu lookit thet, says his voice, as the fourth jack is turned up. I reckon now, barrin miracles, the prizner’s mine. Stealthily, as the fourth king falls, he unsheathes his bowie knife. The dealer’s head twitches slightly as though he might have heard something out of order and were cocking his ear toward it, so his voice says from the chair: Aint thet sumthin! Four jacks! Four kings! But we aint done yet, podnuh. Yu owe me another card. Yu aint doled out but four. The fat man hesitates, tipping slightly toward the voice, then, somewhat impatiently, flicks out a black queen, which falls like a provocation between the two hands of armed men. Well ifn thet dont beat all, his voice exclaims. How’d thet fifth jack git in thar? The dealer starts, seems about to reach for his gun or the card, but stays his hand and, after the briefest hesitation, flips over a fifth king. Haw, says the voice. Nuthin but a mizzerbul deuce. Gotcha, ole man! And as the gun comes out and blasts the chair away, he buries the blade deep in the dealer’s throat, slicing from side to side through the thick piled-up flesh like stirring up a bucket of lard.

The man does not fall over but continues to sit there in his rotundity as before, his head slumping forward slightly as though in disappointment, his blue spectacles skidding down his nose away from the puckery dimples where eyes once were. His gun hand twitches off another shot, shattering an overhead lamp and sending everyone diving for cover, then turns up its palm and lets the pistol slip away like a discard. A white fatty ooze leaks from the slit throat, slowly turning pink. He wipes his blade on the shoulders of the man’s white linen suit, triggering a mechanical holdout mechanism that sends a few aces flying out his sleeves, and then he carefully resheathes it, eyeing the others all the while as they pick themselves up and study this new circumstance. He’s not sure how they will take it or just who this dealer was to them, so to distract them from any troublous thoughts they may be having, he says: Looks like them winnins is up fer grabs, gentamin.

That sets off the usual crazed melee, and while they are going at it he arrests the wheel of fortune to free the schoolmarm. When he releases her wrists, he half expects her to slap his face again, but instead she faints and collapses over his shoulder, her hands loosely whacking him behind, so that he has to unbind her hips and ankles with the full weight of her upon him. It is getting ugly in the churchroom, guns and knives are out and fists and bottles are flying, so he quickly sidles out of there, toting her beam-high over his shoulder like a saddlebag, the room conveniently shrinking toward the exit to hasten his passage. At the door, before darting out into the night, he glances back over his free shoulder at the mayhem within (this is his town and for all he knows the only people he has ever had and he is about to leave them now forever) and sees through the haze the dead dealer, still slumped there under the glowing lamp like an ancient melancholic ruin, his hairless blue-bespectacled head slowly sinking away into his oozing throat.

He strides, under a tapestry of faintly pulsing stars, through the desolate town, whistling softly for his horse, one hand gripping a lax tender thigh, the other clasped behind her skirted knees. He assumes the church will not long contain the turmoil within, but his hopes of getting out of here quickly are fading. He headed first for the blacksmith’s shed where last he spied the black mare, but the shed was not where he remembered it to be; finding the jailhouse with the gallows out front instead, he made next for the stables but wound up again at the jail. She was getting heavy, so he thought to hide her in her schoolhouse until he could locate the mare or some other horse or pair of horses, but he has come once more to the gallows and the jailhouse, or they have come to him. He stands there by the hanging place in the hushed darkness, whistling softly, frustration welling up in his breast (where is that damned horse?), trying to get his bearings, his cheek pressed against a flexuous hip, his arms hugging her legs as if they were the one sure thing he might still hold on to. Tacked up on the scaffold is one of the posters announcing the schoolmarm’s high-noon hanging on the morrow, though in the dim starlight her portrait’s fierce severity seems to have mellowed, as though surrendering to whatever fate awaits her. He is determined she will not hang—if asked why he has come here, he would now say this was why—and it is as if the portrait recognizes that and so looks out upon him more with hope than outrage; but just how he is to accomplish her rescue is not yet clear to him, which may account for the gentle perplexity he also seems to read upon the portrait’s face, its gaze beseeching, its lips slightly parted as though to ask a question, or receive a kiss. Of farewell? He feels a pricking in the corners of his eyes and water forms there, which he supposes must be tears. He must not fail her. He turns his head away from that dread instrument with its noosed rope hanging high against the night, and this loner, this aloof and restless gunslinger, footloose, free, beholden to no one and no thing, presses his lips reverently against the softness there upon his shoulder, gazing past the sweet black hillock of her haunch at the field of throbbing stars in the moonless sky beyond and thinking: I am wholly lost and am not who I thought I was.

He is about to set off on another search for horse or cover when he hears the church letting out behind him and the men pouring clamorously into the street. There’s no time; they seem to be approaching rapidly from all directions, hollering out their rapturous oaths and maledictions and firing off their weapons. He jogs heavily across the street, feeling pursued now, the schoolmarm’s head bouncing against his back (the beseeching gaze, parted lips: he’s not thinking upon these now, though he knows he surely will again), and ducks into the jailhouse, but, encumbered by the burden of her, he cannot throw the bolt before the men of the town come pounding in and push him back.

Yo, sheriff! Lookit whut yu got thar!

Haw! Aint she a gratifyin sight!

Done hit the jackpot, the sheriff did!

They light the lamps and circle about him, filling up the room, raucously admiring the woman slung over his shoulder, reaching out to try to palpate her lifeless parts or poke at them with their greasy gunbarrels. He fends them off as best he can, backing toward the cell door, considering his choices. Probably he has none.

We wuz afeerd we wuz gonna miss out our neck-stretchin party!

Yu done good, sheriff! Yu done right by the lawr!

Now whynt yu go treat yerself to a easeful potation, podnuh, and rest up fer the big day, says a toothless pop-eyed hunchback tented in a voluminous white linen jacket with a deputy’s badge pinned upside down to its stained lapel. We’ll take keera the prizner fer yu.

No, he says. In former times he would have simply shot his way out of here, tried to; can’t do that now. Yu’ll leave her be. She aint gonna hang.

Whut—?

I’m lettin her go.

Yu caint do thet, sheriff! Yu aint got the right!

We built thet new gallows jest fer her!

Hadta use up the whole back halfa the feed store fer the wood!

Caint hep thet. She aint the one. I stole thet hoss.

Yu whut—?

The men fall back momentarily, their jovial mien turned dark, while under his hand the schoolmarm’s thigh twitches and stiffens as though tweaked awake by his stark confession. Put me down, she demands icily from behind his back, and all the softness seems to go out of her. Immediately, please.

Tarnation, someone mutters, and fires a gob into the cell behind him for exclamatory punctuation. Looks like we’ll hafta change the pitcher on all them fuckin posters.

He drops to his knees to set her feet on the floor, watched closely by the surly men crowding round once more, and she straightens up above him, touching his shoulder briefly to brace herself, a touch, though merely expedient, for which he is grateful. He continues to kneel there for a moment, as if petitioning for mercy, which is perhaps what he’s doing, but without another word she turns on her stolid black heels and, hands clasped at her waist, struts away toward the door, the men removing their hats and backing off to let her pass. It is not his wont to break a silence, but faced with the dreadful and endless one to which he is now condemned (which he will confront, when she is gone, with the quiet stoicism that is his nature and by which he’s known, and has known himself), he cannot help himself: Yu aint never even thanked me, he calls out.

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?