David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Spied the—” Turkey swallowed dismally. “Oh, now look, ma’am, I already done informed you at least ten times, I ain’t but only nineteen years old. And on top of which I—”

So it was a moment before he noticed the gun. It was tiny, a Derringer, but more than adequately persuasive, and he realized too that his own body concealed it from the doctor, or from anyone else. It did not waver, did not falter once as she pressed it cold against his navel where a button was long since missing from his woolens.

“Oh, we was right fond chums fer years,” the doctor’s voice came obliquely then, from where he had accosted someone else in the crowd. “Real misunderstood lad he were too, sort of a modern nineteenth-century Prince Robin Hood, if’n the facts were knowed. But say, you don’t happen to call to mind nobody looking for employment maybe, say some feller round about Hoke Birdsill’s heft and build?”

All of which left Turkey Doolan no solace but to further indulge his infested scalp where he stood, wondering in considerably more bewilderment than ever now, just what, after all, had happened, and precisely how, since a good deal unquestionably had, or so it most certainly seemed, while the main roof of Belle’s place collapsed in a roar across the street behind them.

“Call me Agnes, why don’t you?” the woman suggested.

Meanwhile, back at the bordello, for some time before the fire Hoke Birdsill had been remarkably confused himself. He had not heard the early shotgun blast which indicated that Dingus was escaping from jail, nor did he hear the preacher, Rowbottom, verifying the accomplishment. Once he had been confronted by Belle’s protestations of abiding devotion, and her proposal of marriage, sense of the inescapable had clouded Hoke’s mind like mist.

So he probably did not realize either, when he finally awoke, that he had fainted. He was still in Belle’s bedroom, but he had no notion whatsoever of the time. And why was he undressed, stripped to his woolens? What made his jaw ache is it did?

Hoke could only moan, feeding upon his own malaise. And it was about to get worse, since there remained the rest of it to be remembered now also, the incredible climax of his visit to Miss Pfeffer’s, his subsequent meeting with Anna Hot Water in the street. “Three?”he asked himself miserably. “Three separate catastrophes all scheduled for the same solitary hour?”

Like some wet, furred beast, Hoke shuddered, burrowing more deeply into Belle’s blankets. He lay with his angular knees drawn up against his chest, his eyes closed. “But maybe I’ll jest up and die,” he speculated hopefully. “Maybe that initial doctor back there in Santa Fe were right that time, and all of them others made a error, and I ain’t got but a few months left. A man could face that much, I reckon.”

Hoke had ventured only one glance about the room, through a single, heavy-lidded eye, bothered by the lamplight. He had thought himself alone. But gradually now he became aware of sounds behind him, although he did not turn. “Three?” he asked himself again.

But when the sounds increased, almost as if some heavy object of furniture were being disturbed, Hoke at last rolled from the wall. The light remained insupportable, but one of the girls was in fact moving something, dragging an enormous wardrobe trunk toward Belle’s rear door, or trying to. She was new to the house, or moderately so, since Hoke scarcely recognized her. “Well, howdy do,” she greeted him. “You sure did have yourself a snooze, dint you? Why, you was jest snoring to beat a brass band.”

Hoke forced himself to sit, if with inordinate effort, then scrubbed at his mustache with the back of a wrist. “What time’s it got to be?” he asked wearily.

“Jest a mite before midnight, I do believe,” the girl said.

Hoke gazed blearily at nothing. “You happen to notice my duds around anywheres?”

“Don’t seem to,” the girl said. Hoke saw now that she was quite young, and fairly appealing also, although somewhat excessively rouged and powdered. Watching him in turn, after a moment she sighed. “Meantimes I jest don’t know how I’m ever gonter get this trunk down those high stairs now,” she told him.

Hoke scowled, considering it without exuberance himself. The trunk was as large as any he had ever seen, and very much like one of Belle’s. In fact he was almost certain it was hers.

So then he sobbed. “Don’t tell me she’s already done got readied up for a honeymoon?”

“Who would that be?”

“Jest Belle, I reckon,” he said wretchedly. “Excepting what she don’t know is that there’s two other female personages doubtless preparing to do the same thing at the same—”

“Oh, well, say now, is Belle getting wedded? Truly?” The girl tittered. “And are you the lucky feller? Why, I declare, if’n that ain’t jest the wonderfulest thing!”

This time Hoke could only groan.

“Except I wouldn’t know anything about Belle’s own packing,” the girl went on then. “But concerning the trunk, well, Belle said I could borrow that. It’s my poor aged mother who’s pitifiil ill, you see, back home in Texarkana. I jest got the sad news tonight, from a wayfaring stranger who did the kindness of carrying the letter, and I have to hasten to her bedside. I’ve got a buckboard all prepared down below, too, but I jest can’t fathom how I’m gonter get it loaded, I mean all by my helpless self, and—”

“Huh?” Hoke finally roused himself from his stupor. “Oh. Oh, yair.” He got to his feet. “You’ll pardon my woo-lies, I reckon. But I’m still durned if’n I kin recollect what happened to my duds.”

But for that matter he was unable to remember having undressed either, on top of which his jaw did seem injured now at that. Rubbing it, and troubled by a persistent sense of disjunction, Hoke hestitated briefly. Then, with a shrug, he bent to the trunk.

Hoke blanched. “Whatcha got in there,” he asked, “Belle’s table silver?” It took virtually all of his strength to jerk it into the doorway.

The girl averted her face with a giggle. “Oh, you know the way a female does collect pretty things, like frilly drawers and such—”

Hoke shook his head. “Well,” he breathed. But at least he could see the buckboard hitched and accessible in the yard below. “I’m gonter have to bounce her some, going down.”

“Why, I think you’re doing right heroically—”

She waltzed down ahead of him while he coped with it as well as possible, which meant assaying no more than a step at a time and having to rest after each. He managed with an extravagant final effort to shoulder it onto the rear rack of the buckboard itself, however, although for an instant it teetered precariously when his knees threatened to give. Hoke staggered against the back wheel, panting.

So he was by no means fully recovered when the pistol shot cracked somewhere in the distance, although it was not merely fatigue which kept the sound from interesting him particularly. Rather it was the girl herself, only that moment mounting the wagon and suddenly, startlingly, presenting Hoke with a spectacular new perspective on her appearance. Viewed from below, massive and pillowlike, her bosom was little short of astounding.

But when a second shot followed, and quickly after that a third, even Hoke found himself disturbed. “Oh, dear me, then they truly are having that dreadful gun battle after all,” the girl exclaimed. “Why, it almost makes a lass happy she’s leaving, when—”

“Gunfight?” Hoke frowned. “Now who would be—?”