David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“But I still don’t know what you’re—”

“You jest start cogitating on exactly where you want that bank to be,” Dingus said, “and I’ll be back here in less’n a month.” He did not explain further, already leading his horse from the barn. “Oh, yes, indeedy,” he told himself, saddling up. “And it’s been getting on time I went and done me some honest stealing, anyways.”

But it wasn’t a month. Nor was it two or even three. He tried flattery first, but this did not even get him into the bedroom, the office. “Because you lissen here now, Sonny,” Belle Nops told him, “I nominate my own jockeys, and I ain’t so saddle-wore that they’re about to be snotty twerps wet behind the ears yet, neither. Anyways you’d rattle around like a small dipper in a big bucket.”

“But I knowed me a right smart of older ladies,” Dingus protested, “and they’d speak admiringly of me, too. Why, you jest write a brief letter of inquiry to Miss Felicia Grimshaw, over to Galveston, say, or Miss Youngblood in the same—”

“I just this morning hired on a unplucked little thirteen-year-old from Nogales,” Belle told him, “down the hall in the end room. Three dollars cash money, you can do the first-night honors.”

So then he stole a key and tried rape. What he had in mind, of course, was an eventual intimacy that would lead to his presence on an occasion when the safe was opened. But he had never been exceptionally strong, nor did he weigh as much as a hundred and forty pounds, and she outwresded him easily each time. He had been jumping her from behind the door. When he changed his tactics and did not materialize from within her closet until she stood stripped to her garters, she finally got mad enough to heave him bodily down the rear staircase.

Dingus sprained a wrist. But if he had to give up on it for a time after that, he finally did commit one actual crime while nursing the injury in a sling. He was not sure how much educational value the experience offered, the victim being an acquaintance. Too, he had intended appropriating the man’s derby hat only; the slightly moist eight hundred dollars from within it was sheer happenstance.

When a new strategy at last did occur to him, it was based on the theory that recumbency would be half the battle. So this time he waited outside the bordello entirely until he believed she would be asleep. Then he made use of his key, undressed soundlessly, and slipped into her elusive embrace.

Some weeks after that, when he was two days away from being hanged, he complained moderately to Hoke Bird-sill. “Least you might have done,” he said, t6y oucould of wore that there new sheriff’s star on your woolens, I reckon, so a feller’d know jest who it were he was about ready to violate.”

But even after he had talked Hoke into letting him escape, simultaneously appropriating the latter’s reward money as an afterthought, the sense of his unfulfilled mission continued to plague him. It had become a matter of more than Drucilla and their bank; there was a man’s pride. Yet in his next two attempts he did not even reach the bordello itself, what with Hoke lying in wait for him behind it.

Dingus supposed he could not blame Hoke for a certain annoyance, though as a matter of truth the man’s intrepidity puzzled him. “Maybe I oughter of added it where Johnny Ringo and the Dalton brothers involved with Mister Earp in the valiant story of how I got my wrist wounded that time,” he speculated. When Hoke put a bullet through the loaned-out vest for the second consecutive time, Dingus concluded the project could wait again after all. He decided he might as well add Hoke’s three thousand eight hundred dollars to the four hundred in his sock at Santa Fe.

But he was still some distance away, curled foetally into his blankets on a chilly night west of the Pecos, when he had a new educational experience altogether. He had no opportunity to flee as the two men appeared, since they materialized so unexpectedly in the flickering glow of his campfire, and so soundlessly, that for an instant he almost believed it a dream. In fact the first thing he saw was the naked bore of the sawed-off shotgun itself, as it was thrust beneath his chin. “One move and you’re deceased,” he was told.

But then he was less afraid of being murdered intentionally than of having it occur by accident, since the man covering him was so nervous that the shotgun commenced to tremble unconscionably in his hands, pointing into Dingus’ left eye one instant, his navel the next. Nor was the second thief any more composed. Snatching up Dingus’ weapons, he dropped each of them at least once before managing to scatter them beyond reach in the mesquite.

Then, abruptly, constellations exploded inside Dingus’ skull. So the conversation which followed seemed dreamlike also:

“Great gawd amighty, what did you clobber him for?”

“Well, will you jest look! All that there cash! I thought he’d be jest some cowpuncher on the trail, prob’ly, but this critter is very doubtless a outlaw hisself I mean a authentic one, and—”

“Well, it’s too late now, since we got it half took anyways”

“Oh, I jest knew it! I jest knew we’d git our fannies stomped on. Because now he’s likely to hunt us down fer revenge, or—”

“Well, we still got to take it Because we been intending at least one gen-u-ine daring deed fer years now, instead of jest writing to them newspapers, and this has got to be it I’llget the horses.”

“Shouldn’t we oughter bind him up, maybe? I mean it, Vm right scared, Doc— “

“Let’s jest get the b Jesus out of here fast, Wyatt—”

Then he had one further lesson to muse upon when he reached Santa Fe itself, since Horn’s leather shop was already boarded up when he got there, and cousin Redburn and his three younger daughters were in the very process of loading a wagon with what appeared to be the totality of their household effects. Nor was Drucilla herself anywhere in evidence. Cousin Redburn glanced at Dingus as if he had been absent no longer than a matter of days. “Come into a bit of cash currency,” he announced matter-of-factly, “so I’m heading back East like I always wanted. Real windfall it were, I do admit.”

“What?” Dingus said. “Cash? Lissen, you didn’t happen to go and find no four hundred dollars in a old sock out back in the—?”

“Well say, ain’t it a coincidence that I done jest that! But how on earth would you happen to of guessed it, Dingus?”

“How? Only because it’s my own durned last-remaining money, is all. How else do you think, you mule-sniffing old—”

“I don’t reckon you could prove that, could you, nephew? A notorious outlaw like you turned out to be? Now who do you think would accept your word against that of a respectable, hard-working shopkeeper who done took you in one time out’n Christian decency, and you jest a poor waif of an orphan then too?”

Dingus did not argue. He didn’t cave, even after what he had already lost. “All right,” he said, “never mind that. At least this time it’s straight stealing again anyways, upright reaching in and taking it, which puts you in a class with some better folks than the rest of my cousins. It’s almost a pleasure. But where’s Drucilla? That’s what I come back for anyways, not no piddling four hundred dollars or—”

“Ain’t heard, huh?” cousin Redburn asked.

“Heard what?”

“Well now, old Drucy, she done got married up with a lawyer feller.”

“She done what? With a who?”

“Yep. Right interesting story, too. You recollect that Comanche uprising here in town, back a while ago? Well, seems like what started it, it were some white feller diddling around with Comanche pussy, although as a matter of fact nobody could ever rightly learn that part of it too straight. But anyhow there was this one big buck was involved someway, and it seems he jest never did get over bearing a grudge. So even after the territorial governor declared a amnesty, this particular critter, he kept agitating troubles. Big foul-looking monstrosity, got a knife scar down one side of his face, and been shot in the shoulder once, likewise. And the ironic part was, he weren’t even married, but it appears what annoyed him was a white man carnal-ing jest any squaw a-tall. So anyways it turns out, he broods and broods back there on the reservation all this time, and then one day he comes riding on into town here, right smack down the main street bold as a fart in church. Couple of fellers like to shot him on sight, nacherly, but what with that there amnesty and all, well, they think twice about it. So meanwhile this here buck, by now he’s over to the main plaza, out front of the Fred Harvey Hotel it were, and the next thing you know, he’s sitting there crosslegged on the ground with his horse hobbled under a tree. Jest asittin’, is all, like maybe he’s resting a spell. He had a supply of jerkey with him, I reckon, or whatever all else it is them heathens eat, because the next thing after that, darned if’n he didn’t keep right on sitting there too, fer four whole days and nights. Weren’t nobody could figure out what he had in mind neither, except for watching folks contemptuous-like, and he sure done a heap of that, staring beady-eyed at anybody who went on by. Got to be a mite spooky after a time, sure enough, and some of the folks with shops down that way didn’t appreciate it nohow, since a right smart of the wives in town had already took to doing their purchasing elsewhere. So it’s likely he would of got shot after all, if’n he didn’t finally quit it. And by then we should of had some notion what he planned on doing, of course, seeing as how he hadn’t done it that anybody’d noticed before that, not once in the four days or nights. It must of been jest before dawn when he skedaddled, although nobody seen him go, but then the next morning it was like he was still sitting there anyhow, in a way, since folks had got so used to taking a nervous glance at him there still weren’t nobody could pass the spot without they looked over now also. Which must of been jest what he calculated on, in his scornful manner, because right there it stood, heaped up fer all to see and looking like there weren’t no human being in this world, and not even no redskinned one neither, could leave that much of a monument behind with jest one solitary dumping of his bowels—”