Ghost Town: A Novel (8 page)

The old prospector seems to relish the idea of having his photograph taken, even if he won’t be around for the actual event, so he props him up there on the chair the photographer has dragged out of the shot-up shack. Jest lean me sideways, boys, the prospector wheezes, so’s I dont hafta set on thet damn arrow.

The ole fart’s gone all t’hair, the photographer grumbles from under his black hood as he peers through his lens, the greasy black strands of his own hair dangling under the cloth like spiders’ legs. Looks like the ass end of a fuckin porkypine. Fit him out thar with his pick’n pan, why dont yu, make him look half human.

He does so, also loads him up with his antiquated sidearms and sets his slouch hat on square, as the photographer instructs, and then he remounts the swayback mule and prepares to move on. Whut yu need, son, the old codger calls out, is a proper sidekick. He wags his gnawed armbone at him accusingly, or maybe he’s just waving goodbye. It’s about the nakedest thing he’s ever seen. I’da been happy t’oblige but yu come too goddam late!

I know it, he says. Dont seem to of been on time fer nuthin yet. Reckon thet must be
my
style.

That sets off another fit of cackling and wheezing and dark spewing, a sorry spectacle which he rides away from. The town meanwhile has finally sunk from sight and he is alone once more out on the vast empty desert.

It is dark, another moonless desert night, when he comes at last on the lost posse, locating them not by their campfire or bitter laughter but by the lowing of the vast herd of cattle they have gathered around them, their distant fire flickering in the herd’s depths like the candlelit core of an unstable maze. They’ve filled up the whole prairie with the dumb shuffling beasts; he has to pick his way through thousands of them, trying to avoid their scything horns, egging on his reluctant mount, which is white now only on its underside, away from the weather; it’s like moving through some viscous and muscular sea, shoving against a stubborn tide, though how he even knows about seas and tides, he has no idea. Once among them, he can see nothing else for miles around, and he worries that maybe he’s fated to be rafted here above their pale humped hides forever, or anyway until his raft’s old shanks give way. Gaps open between their flanks, he pushes into them, bumped and jostled from the rear, then pokes and prods with his rifle barrel to pry open new gaps, but his progress is both slow and without sensible direction, that flickering firelight itself now lost to view.

Hlo, sheriff. About fuckin time yu turned up, growls a hollow voice at his back. He bends round in his slope seat, his Winchester across his thighs. The posse’s just behind him, sitting around a roaring campfire by the chuckwagon, smoking, chewing their grub, belching, drinking from mugs and bottles. A gaunt bald-pated scar-faced man, wearing his hat on his back with a cord around his throat, is blowing on an ocarina, making a low wailing noise not unlike the far-off lowing of cattle, which may be all he’s heard all night, except for the sluggish thump and rustle of the chafing bodies. A one-eared mestizo with a crushed bowler and an eyepatch looks up from the old white stick he’s whittling and, the light from the fire lighting up his good eye like a hot coin, asks: Whut kep yu so goddam long?

The sheriff’s been out, yu know,
trail
-blazin, says another, and they all bark and hoot at that and explode a fart or two.

A wizened bespectacled hunchback in banker’s pants and watch-fobbed waistcoat spits into the flames and says: Well dont be a stranger, sheriff. C’mon over’n rest yer can a spell.

He shrugs and, using his knees and raps of his rifle butt, he slowly pivots his old spindleshanks around toward the fire, but it’s an obstinate creature and by the time he has managed it, cattle have crowded up around him again and the campfire seems to have receded. Between him and it: the scrawny rumps of a dozen or so cows with their tails up in the air.

Haw. Looks like yu’ll hafta fuck yer way in here, sheriff, says a brawny skew-jawed lout with a bandanna headband and a thin black mustache.

Naw, them ole bossies dont fancy the sheriff, grunts the hunchback. It’s thet handsome white stallion whut’s got their tails up.

Thet hoss is a real byooty awright. I feel a kinder lustful hankerin fer it myself.

Boys, I tell yu, says a squint-eyed old graybeard with a preacherly manner, t’bestride sech a hoss as thet’d be like bein born agin!

They all yea-say that campmeeting style and suck worshipfully from their whiskey bottles—Or t’
be
bestrid! Yeah! Haw! Aymen, brother!—but meanwhile the cows have nudged him further and further away until he can no longer make out the details up there: just a bunch of dark shadowy figures huddled in their hats around a cold fire, alone in the dark sea of cattle, the chuckwagon a vague glimmerous shape against the black sky like a screen hiding something.

Ho, sheriff! one of them shouts, can’t tell which, his far-off holler all but lost in the shapeless prairie night. Whar yu goin? The beans is agittin cold!

Instead of cows’ bumholes he’s mostly looking at the front ends of steers now, their horned heads down and dangerous. In fact, he realizes that the only reason his poor old mount is still upright is that the steer that has impaled it has its horns stuck in its gut and so is holding up a creature now mainly dead. The campfire off in the distance looks no more substantial than a match being held to a cigarillo. Before it’s snuffed out altogether, he cocks his rifle, shoots the steer below behind the ear, and hops off as both beasts collapse like deflating balloons. Other steers are pawing the ground menacingly but he brings them down with his rifle, then draws his six-shooters and fires away at the lot, clearing space. The sharp shocking report of gunfire in the still night causes those near him to break in panic and they charge off blindly in all directions, pounding into each other and into the massed-up crowd of those around them, spreading terror like a stone slapped into water. Soon the entire herd is on the move but with nowhere to go, the ground quavering under the thunderous buffeting of their hoofs and their colliding bodies like a bedroll being shaken out. Some of the wild-eyed creatures come running straight at him, but he holds his ground, unsteady as it is, bringing them down one by one, pumping lead into their dim cow brains, his weapons growing hot in his hands. The roar of their stampeding is deafening and more than once he is brought to his knees by the violent convulsions of the earth beneath him, but then suddenly the entire herd vanishes into the night like a slate being erased and all is still.

He holsters his pistols, picks up his fallen rifle, reloads it, and begins the long trek on foot to the campfire, stepping over and around the silhouetted carcasses that line his path back like lumpy milestones. Some of the cattle he passes are not yet dead and they gaze up at him pitiably with their big wet eyes, through which he shoots them with his rifle to make their dying short but vivid to them.

He is met at the campfire by muttering and grumbling, incomprehensible except for the swearwords, which are in the majority but add up to nothing in particular. Tell me that agin, he says.

We said yu done some serious damage to our herd, sheriff, snarls the wamper-jawed lout with the pencil-lined upper lip. In fact it aint thar no more. We’re gonna hafta dock yer pay.

Thet’s good news. Didnt know I wuz gittin paid.

Well it aint much. We figger after tonight’s deevastation yu’re about forty years in debt to us.

And thet dont include our sentymental feelins toward them pore little dogies, says the preacherly graybeard, snatching a lizard off a rock and tossing it into the fire to watch it wriggle. We been left downright bereft.

He eyes them coldly, rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Well thet’s most lamentable, he says. But whut wuz yu doin with alla them cattle anyhow? I thought yu wuz ahuntin injun scalps.

Well the problem with thet, sheriff, says the hunchback, shoving a chaw of tobacco into his grizzled cheeks, is we’re plumb outa savages. Aint seed a live one with his skin still on in a coon’s age. He spits into the fire to set it sizzling.

But whut about alla them misabused wimmenfolk?

All them whut?

Oh right, snorts the mestizo, glancing up with his good eye from his whittling. Hah! The wimmenfolk!

They heehaw and whistle at that and, while the ocarina player blows a dancehall tune, a pig-eyed fat man with a waxed handlebar mustache rises from his squat for a moment to drop his pants and wriggle his arse at the fire.

Well lets see, says the squint-eyed old fellow with the high manner. I estimate we did mebbe go dig up a ole burial ground fer some deceased scalps. Jest not t’disappoint, y’know. They’re in a saddlebag over thar. They got a unseemly odor about em, but hep yerself.

But thet aint the point. Yu all been deppitized.

Well we undeppitized ourselves, sheriff. It jest warnt no fun. We tuck up cowpunchin instead.

Beats scalp huntin all t’blazes.

Yu eat better too, says the fat man, rebuttoning his breeches. Less yu got some trigger-happy damfool comin along’n drivin off yer larder. The others rumble and growl at that, while the fat man relights a stubby black cigar butt in the fire.

Whut I caint quite figger is whar’d yu git em all?

Git em?

Yer stock.

Well we, uh, we borried em, explains a weedy wall-eyed runt, picking his teeth with a sliver of bone.

Yu mean yu rustled alla them cattle?

Well yu dont hafta put a name to it, sheriff. But how else yu gonna git yu a steer out in these parts?

We jest kinder pass em around out here, y’see, says the hunchback, peering up at him over his wire-rimmed spectacles, his cheek bulging with chaw. He lets fly another load into the fire. It’s how we do it.

I dunno. I aint never read the lawr but I think yu broke it, he says.

They all just smile back blankly at him. Naw. Haw!

Whut’s agin the lawr, sheriff, says the fat man around his cigar stub, is shootin up other folks’ cows and runnin their herds off. Thet thar’s a capital offense throughout the whole goddam Terrortory. Reckon we may have no choice but t’string yu up fer thet one. Jest t’be proper, y’know.

Less a course yu hightail it out thar’n brang em all back agin.

How’m I gonna do thet? They went off ever which way.

Shit, I dunno, sheriff. It’s yer fuckin neck, yu figger it out.

I kin see thet rapscallion aint gonna rectify his heinous misdeeds.

Nor even repent of em. He’s a hard case.

Only trouble is, whar kin we hang him? They aint no trees out here.

We kin use the chuckwagon, says the fat man, taking up a coil of rope and cutting off a length with a butcher knife. Ifn it aint high enuf, we’ll hitch up the hosses’n drug him along behind it.

Hole up thar, buttbrain, says the one-eared mestizo with the eyepatch, rising to his feet. Aint nobody messin with the sheriff, not while I’m deppity.

Yeah? And whut yu gonna do about it, yu scumsuckin greaser?

I’ll show yu whut I’m gonna do, yu mizzerbul dumsquizzled lardass, snarls the mestizo, throwing away his white stick and hurling himself at the fat man with his whittling knife. The fat man is caught off guard and the knife rips into his groin, the cigar butt popping from his lips as though triggered out by the invading blade, but he manages to plunge his own butcher knife deep into the mestizo’s belly, both men grunting and staggering back before lunging at each other again.

Hey! Jest wait up thar, fellers! he shouts, raising his rifle. Stop thet!

Now dont go botherin inta other folks’ bizness, sheriff, says the old fellow with the squinny, batting his rifle away. This aint none a yer concern.

But—!

Others grab him and pin his arms back. It’s outside yer fuckin jurisdiction, sheriff, they grunt, raising him off the ground and roping his ankles together.

Defense is not a significant part of either man’s technique. They just go at it freestyle, cutting each other over and over; it’s more a matter of pace and persistence than artfulness as their bloodied knives, catching the light from the campfire, flash in and out of each other’s bodies. His deputy loses his other ear and his voice pipe, no doubt more within besides; the fat man’s smile is widened from ear to ear, his stiffened handlebars snicked to a brush, and his belly’s so punctured his guts start to spill out; but neither man gives an inch.
Whuck, whuck, whuck
, the knives go, and nothing he can do but watch, both men blinded now by blood and injury, taking blow after blow after blow, the other men of the posse cheering them on, laying bets on the side, pushing the antagonists back into it if they chance to stagger apart. Finally, the butcher knife breaks off in the mestizo’s ribs and, as the disarmed fat man slumps to his knees, the mestizo finishes him off in the slaughterhouse manner by stabbing him two-fisted in the back of the neck.

His minced-up deputy stands there, weaving about, still wearing his crushed bowler and the broken blade in his chest, his body sliced open in a hundred places and showing its inner regions, but with his own bloody knife outthrust as though ready as ever to take on all comers. The fire shimmers patchily on his chopped-up face and casts a hulking shadow on the chuckwagon behind him.

Awright, awright, deppity, we take yer point, says the brawny lout irritably. But whut about our goddam cattle?

The deputy, his vocal cords cut and dangling from the hole in his throat, cannot reply, but he turns to the bald ocarina player and gestures with his knife.

Reckon he wants yu t’pipe us a tune on yer sweet patayta, says the bespectacled hunchback.

The man cups the instrument in his large bony hands, bends his gleaming dome toward the fire, and once again imitates the moan of lowing cattle. Almost instantly, about as fast as the fluttered shuffle of a deck of cards, the prairie fills up all around with grazing cattle again.

With that, they set him down again and unbind his ankles. He picks up the fallen Winchester. Ifn yu could do thet, he grumps, why’d yu make sech a fuss?