David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

So it was the oldest daughter, Drucilla. It took a while, because when Dingus reached Santa Fe she was scrawny yet, and anyway she ignored Dingus almost as completely as did Horn himself, either out of some ingrained familial shyness or perhaps simply because the dreariness which pervaded the household was contagious. In the beginning Dingus could not have cared less. He went his own way, and before he was fifteen he had taken to drifting into odd jobs at the nearby cattle ranches.

And then Dingus fell in love. He did not know how it happened, and on this particular occasion he had been away only four months, on a cattle drive to the Kansas railheads. But she had blossomed. Maybe it was her hair, which for the first two years had been severely braided but now hung unbound about her pink shoulders. Yet there seemed to be new flesh everywhere he looked also, and her breasts were suddenly indubitable. Within days Dingus was doing his utmost to lure her into the darkness of the leather shop after hours.

She finally hit him with an adze. “You stink of cow,” she informed him.

“What’s wrong with that? It’s what I been riding behind the backsides of, is all.”

He took a bath nonetheless, but that did not help either. “Because there just isn’t anything romantic about you,” she said.

He still did not understand, so she finally showed him the cuttings. She had a hatbox full of them, newspaper accounts and artists’ sketches of General George Armstrong Custer, Captain W.J. Fetterman, Buffalo Bill Cody. “But that’s loco,” Dingus insisted. “All they done, they shot Injuns, and the true fact is, most of’em got kilt theirselves in the process. Why, that Custer weren’t nothing but a mule-sniffing, boastful, yeller-haired fool that dint have the sense to wait on the rest of his troops and got massacred for it, and anyways, you know darned well there ain’t a hos-tile Injun within ten days of here no more. The few tame ones there is, they’re jest on reservations. So how kin anybody go out and—?”

But Drucilla merely shrugged. So he had to do something. Because if it had been love before, within another month it was chronic desperation (worse, she bathed often, and he had discovered a peephole into the shed where they kept the tub). He owned a cow horse of his own, and a fourth-hand Remington revolver. When he saw her actually frame a portrait of Custer and then sigh wistfully as she nailed it above her bed, he saddled up and rode off.

The nearest reservation was two days away. He had about twenty dollars in his pocket, and he stopped the first dozen Indians he saw, asking where he might purchase old scalps. But most of them were Navajos and Pueblos who had never been belligerent to start with (some of the former tried to sell him blankets instead). One dispossessed old Zuñi finally told him the Spanish missionaries had long since confiscated all such distasteful trophies anyway.

So he had given up on it and was about to return home, disconsolately leaving the encampment by a different trail from the one he had followed coming in, when he noticed the Comanche wigwams. There were half a hundred of them, isolated and curiously forbidding, even somehow defiant in their withdrawal. Here and there an idle brave (they were all displaced from northern Texas) watched his passage with an expression openly truculent, and others looked up with similar unfriendliness from parched, unregenerate cornfields. It could have been his imagination, but Dingus hesitated to speak to any of them. Yet it struck him that love might find a way after all.

He waited in a secluded ravine until after dark, and then he slipped back on foot, making his way toward a wigwam before which he had seen a tall somber brave with a knife scar slashed the length of one cheek and the mark of an old bullet wound in his shoulder. “Because if’n the durned preachers done skipped confiscating souvenirs from any heathen in the territory,” he told himself, “I’d bet me a whole cash dollar it’s gonter be that gent right there.”

The camp was silent, and a new moon was obscured by racing low clouds. Mongrel dogs prowled amid the wickiups but without barking, far too accustomed to abuse. There was no sound from within the selected wigwam itself.

Dingus knew that if any scalps were in fact to be found, they would be hanging decoratively from the tent’s ridgepole. With infinite caution, feeling ahead of himself, he crept within and toward it.

Then he stopped dead. His lifted hand had come to rest upon something quite warm, quite soft. It was more than human flesh, it was a portion of human anatomy that Dingus would not have needed cousin Magee’s old textbook to recognize. He had been peeping at Drucilla’s, daily. Before he could withdraw, sleepily, yet reponsively, even more than responsively, a voice muttered, “Again, White Eagle?”

Dingus kissed her. The question had been rhetorical anyway, a hand was already groping unmistakably. Hastily shedding his clothing, disguising his voice in a dull whisper, Dingus said, “Wait. Jest one second now, and I’ll—”

So when she had at last commenced to snore peacefully again, while Dingus still struggled to collect himself, something else moved elsewhere in the wigwam. First Dingus heard a rustling of garments that were decidely not his own. Then the woman said, “What? Oh, now look, you raunchy old ramrod, how many times in one night do you think I—?”

Dingus had never reached the ridgepole. In fact he had lost his bearings completely, and now, fumbling anxiously in search of his pants, he stumbled into something standing behind him. He sprang away as it went over with a sound of crockery smashing. After that he was on his feet and sprinting.

But the brave was up also by then, and Dingus was unable to dodge the hand which snatched at him from behind; it took hold even as he plunged through the entrance. The moon emerged at that same instant. So they confronted one another for the moment as if frozen by the very flood of light itself, Dingus in his woolens with their rear flap commencing to tear where the brave gripped it, half turned away, and the brave himself even more starkly unclothed and with the nature of his interrupted indulgence even more stark than that. At first there was only puzzlement on the Indian’s face. Then, still grasping the hatch of Dingus’ drawers, but with the look turning to one of immemorial indignation now, like some great castrated beast the brave began to bellow. “A paleface! Not even one of those horny Mexican missionaries, but a paleface! In my own—”

But the flap finally gave. Already moving, as if his feet for that matter had not once ceased to move, Dingus plunged back within the tent and then scampered out again at its farther side, uprooting stakes and tearing wildly at skins as he wormed frantically through. The woman screamed, and the camp came alive as if under assault. Only the moon saved him, disappearing miraculously as quickly as it had appeared, while Dingus dove headlong behind stacked corn.

But no one was chasing him after all. Instead, the brave continued shouting where he stood, yet almost inarticulately for the moment so that the others seemed to be gathering about him more in curiosity than anything else, braves and women likewise, in their own assorted conditions of undress or interruption. And Dingus was still too much concerned with his own predicament to be startled at the fluency of the man’s English either, once he became coherent again, especially since the brave was brandishing a gleaming Winchester rifle over his head now too. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s it! The end, the absolute, fornicating end! Because they drove us from the hunting grounds of our ancestors, and we suffered that in silence! Because they gave us treaties from the Great White Father, and then they took our new lands as well, and we endured that likewise! Even when we’ve had nothing to eat but buffalo flop, we have accepted. But now an end! An end, I say! Because when they will not even let a man have his bim-bam in peace, I tell you it is time for revenge.*”