David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Midnight?”

“Midnight,” Anna Hot Water said. “Oh yes, hey. Otherwise I blow you apart from nuts to mustache, you son-um-beetch!”

She left him there, trailing her stench behind her.

He did not go back to the jail. In fact he would not have been able to say where he went at first, pacing the streets dismally. “And I can’t even jest saddle up and skedaddle,” he realized, “because I got to get Dingus hanged proper first, if’n I want to collect that new reward money.”

He stopped at Belle’s. Again he did not know why, except that the house itself, its sheer size, seemed to suggest sanctuary. In the main saloon he gulped several whiskeys, to no avail, however. He did not see Belle herself. People accosted him to ask about the new capture, but he scarcely heard what he told them. An image of Anna Hot Water’s oiled flat head hovered before his eyes. When he squeezed them shut Miss Pfeffer’s blunt, mare-like features replaced it. He saw himself surrounded by whimpering infants, all girls, all with mouse-colored, curl-papered hair.

So when he found that he had climbed to the door of Belle’s office bedroom, standing indecisively but with a hand raised to knock, he still could not have said precisely what he had in mind. He had exchanged hardly a dozen words with Belle in six months. She took a moment to open, then appeared fastening a sleeveless robe about her waist. Muscles rippled in her blacksmith’s arms, and she raised an eyebrow dubiously.

“Well,” she told him, “so you’re a big hombre again, are you? How much do you get that he can connive you out of this time — ten thousand almost, ain’t it? What’s on your alleged mind, Birdsill — you got some business, or do you think your new bank account makes us social equals who just ought to chat for a spell?”

But he wasn’t really listening. So maybe it was the familiar bed behind her, the sheer enormity of that too, which had unconsciously drawn him. But the whole room itself, in the dim glow of a single lamp at the desk, intimated safety, security. Hoke knew the solution then. Because she could hide him here easily, certainly until his money arrived. “I’ll pay you,” he said. “I won’t be too long, it’s jest from Santa Fe. I’ll give you five hundred dollars. And—”

“What?” Belle eyed him askance. “You’ll give me—”

“Five,” Hoke said. “All right, never mind. A thousand. But that’s as high as I kin go. All I want is a few days, and…”

“Well, I’m damned,” Belle said. “You mean to say — because I’ve been offered twenty in my time, and once fifty, too, but that doesn’t count since the varmint didn’t have the cash to start with. But this is—”

“No,” Hoke said. “You got the wrong idea, I jest mean—”

But Hoke did not get to explain. Because what suddenly happened then, what was already starting to happen even as he spoke, could not possibly have astonished or confused him more. Belle Nops abruptly swallowed once, then a second time, standing with one hand lifted to her immemorial bosom. Then the bosom heaved, and her face became contorted, and the swallowing became a series of ragged, inarticulate sobs. “A thousand dollars?” she choked. “A thousand?”

“Well, yair,” Hoke said, “but I don’t see no reason fer—”

And then Belle Nops was weeping. Tears flooded down her painted cheeks, beyond any control. “Oh, Birdsill,” she cried, “you mean after six months you’re that desperate? You truly missed me so much that—”

“Huh?”

“Never,” she sobbed, “never! No man has ever cared that much before. And to think that I made you suffer so long, let your heart break for all this time!”

So now it was Hoke who had commenced to swallow, clutching his derby and stumbling backward against the door. “But—”

Moaning, her incredible bosom rising and falling, she lurched after him. Her eyes were wet, they gleamed. “A thousand dollars! In thirty-nine long years, never once have I been so deeply touched! Keep your money, keep it! I’m yours for nothing! Because I’ve missed you too! Oh, my sweetie, I’ve pined for you so!”

Hoke stumbled against a large stuffed chair, going over. “But I jest wanted to stay for — for—”

“Yes, stay — stay forever! We’ll get married, now, tonight! Because it’s so romantic I could…”

Hoke did not quite scream.

“Because I’ve always loved you,” she cried. “From the very beginning!”

“But — but — all them names you used to call me, every time we—”

“Oh, you foolish, foolish boy, didn’t you understand? It was because a girl can’t be the one to say it, and you yourself were so blind, so blind! But what does the past matter now? What does anything matter? Oh, to think, at last— Missies Hoke Birdsill! Oh, my own sweetie pie—”

Flowing open, her robe enveloped him. The astonishing bosom unfurled like gonfalons loosed, like melons in dehiscence. But Hoke saw not, partook not. He had already fainted.

At times like these, Dingus had to wonder where he had gone astray. “You old mule-sniffer,” he asked himself thoughtfully, alone in the jail, “jest what is it, anyway, makes you so bad?”

But he believed he knew, really. “It’s because I never had me a mother,” he decided, “to guide me onto the correct paths of life.”

For that matter he had never had a father either, or not for long, nor was his name actually Magee. He had been born William Dilinghaus but he had not been able to pronounce that, not when he was first old enough to understand that something else went with the Billy, and Dingus had been the result when he tried. Magee was a cousin. “You might as well call yourself whatever suits your liking,” he had told the boy. “Because there ain’t nothing else gonter come easy in this world, and that’s the gospel.”

On the other hand he did believe he remembered his father faintly, a short, pink-lidded man with hunched shoulders and gone prematurely to fat, and would dream of him from time to time. In the dream his father was ways sitting at a table, dealing cards. Then his head would jerk upright suddenly, as if worked by a bit between his jaws, and a small reddening hole would appear in the center of his forehead.

The cousin denied that Dingus could recall any such thing. “Because you was too young,” he insisted. “Lissen, you weren’t but two when I got the letter from that there peace officer and went rushing up the width of two states to claim you. So you jest must of heard me discoursing on the subject thereafter, is all.”

What happened was this. His father had, in fact, been a gambler, although less than remarkably adept at his profession evidently, since the shooting Dingus thought he remembered, also an actual occurrence, had taken place after a particularly remunerative poker hand the man had won with three aces, two of which were unfortunately noticed to belong to the same suit. This was on a Mississippi steamboat, just north of Natchez. Deckhands were already in the process of weighting down the body, preparatory to depositing it over a rail, when the sound of a baby crying reminded someone that Dilinghaus had not come aboard alone. They found the boy in a lifeboat, teething on several additional mismatched high-denomination cards.

But there was no sign of any mother, on ship or when it docked either, nor did anything in the dead man’s possessions allude to a wife. Indeed, the possessions themselves were few. Dilinghaus had left a cheap gold watch which bore an inscription (obviously a pun of sorts on his name, although of no help to the Natchez constabulary: To my darling Ding, he rings the bell) and a carpetbag containing unwashed laundry and more of the ill-served high cards. The local sheriff did find a letter in the bag, however, addressed to Dilinghaus in care of the steamboat line at Memphis, and wholly concerned with a debt of some thirty dollars owed by the deceased to one Floyd K. Magee of San Antonio. The sheriff wrote to Magee, explaining the situation and requesting any assistance and/or information the man might be able to provide.