David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Well blast that too, you’ve seen me wearing them. They’re right in—” Belle whirled, as if to retrieve the garments from her closet. Then she stopped, finally, utterly, for the instant actually rigid with the comprehension. She stared and stared.

“And you never truly seen him neither, did you?” Hoke said. “Yair, because it were dark as a Ethiopian’s bunghole out there, weren’t it? So if’n I ought of thought to burn the confounded thing six months ago, only I dint, then tonight I should of took it offn that Turkey Doolan feller and put it into a crate and mailed it to somebody in Siberia. Because it were that vest. All you seen were that red-and-yeller vest and that makes four times now he’s done give it to somebody else to get shot at in, only this is the first of the times he his-self went and put on something else in its place. And with a pillow stuffed inside his—”

Belle hit him. Her fist materialized like the hind hoof of a mule and took him on the opposite side of the face this time, slamming him back against the wall and leaving him with his legs stiff but with his heels beginning to slide from under him at once anyway, not trying to stop himself and not really hurt either, not hurting even when he thumped noisily to the floor itself, simply beyond all ability of feeling. “Because I’m probably gonter have heart failure anyways,” he thought. “Because I doubtless am.”

So it was not until he was climbing into Belle’s surrey five minutes later that he began to curse, began to match Belle’s incessant, monotonous yet unrepetitive stream word for word with one of his own, reminded faintly of something by the very sound of it also, although he could not think what, nor did he care. And even then it wasn’t the money, not the long-despaired eight hundred dollars from his derby hat which had started it all and not the subsequent three thousand from the original rewards either, not that and not this latest, the nine thousand five hundred. Nor was it even the dress which he himself, Hoke, was wearing now, the dress which Belle had only moments before flung into his face while changing hurriedly into one over his pants herself and scattering what remained of his own clothing through the upper rear door and into the yard at the same time, telling him, “Yes, a dress, and the damndest gaudiest silkiest one I own likewise, so maybe the next time you spend half a night being helpful to some other saggy-tooled cluck in one of them you’ll have the sense to lift his skirts and see if he’s got the right sort of equipment under there or not.” It wasn’t even that which evoked the oaths.

So it was the pillow, the false bosom. “Because I almost grabbed a quick feel on him,” Hoke realized. “I mean her. Him. Standing next to that buckboard and thinking on how all of a sudden I had three durned women to get myself hid from, which it looked like I’d already done give up trying anyways, and I almost grabbed holt of that one right then and there, jest to show myself a man’s still got some free choice left. And it wouldn’t of been the first time I were in bed with the erection-wasting skunk neither. So now I’m gonter git him. I’m gonter git him now if’n it’s the last thing I do on this earth!”

The surrey skidded and slewed, careening out of the alley and into the street, the road. “Yaaaa!” Belle’s voice roared and roared, her whip exploding over the mares. “Yaaaa!” Hoke rode with his head held low, fearing the sunbonnet might fail to disguise him adequately even in the darkness, and with a hand clasped across his mustache also, until they had thundered well beyond the town itself along the only obvious trail for the top-heavy Dingus to have taken with his prize.

As for the vest, Brother Rowbottom had put that on in all innocence.

He did not understand why it had been left in his shack, although the preacher found it folded far too carefully to suggest inadvertence; in fact it lay atop the very corner of the mattress beneath which he himself had deposited the recently acquired single-action Colt. And the revolver was what he had returned for, of course, after concluding his brief chore. Actually his inquiry had been superfluous; he knew full well that the model would pawn in any saloon for just the figure its previous owner had named.

But then he almost did not go out again after all. Instead, musing absently, he stood for a period as if expecting something, his eyes fast to nothing in particular and yet quite bright, quite alert. What the preacher hoped for was a call, a beckoning, an invocation from elsewhere than in this world. He had been anticipating one for some time now.

Because he had heard such pronouncements before, if not recently. The earliest had come at sixteen, when his family was migrating westward from Tennessee. Indians had attacked their wagon string, killing everyone except Row-bottom himself, although leaving him with his left arm so severely mutilated they obviously believed him dead, and failing to lift his scalp only because, inexplicably, he had already been completely bald for years. Rowbottom wandered in a delirium for days before stumbling into a mining camp where someone was able to complete the necessary amputation.

That was when he first heard the voice, during his convalescence. “Brother, you been chose,” was all it said, but he was confident he knew generally what was implied, if not in the particulars. His father had been a sometime preacher before him, as were several uncles. There were perhaps forty miners in the camp, and his exhortations amused them for a time. But when it occurred to him one bright morning to fire the shed in which the communal whiskey was stored, rather than any appreciation of his zeal it was only his height, and his correspondingly exceptional stride, that got him out of the territory alive.

But he was to change his mind about drink as a vice anyway, or have it changed. This happened after he made his way to Oklahoma to live with a relative, one of the preaching uncles. The man accepted Rowbottom as an acolyte of sorts, restricting him to such ministrations as driving tent pegs and hawking Bibles initially, but finally letting him try his hand in the pulpit also. He made no comment afterward, offered no criticism, or not until some weeks later when he suggested that the boy try again. “But this time you might interpolate a bit more hot pee and vinegar amid the words,” he said then. This was about three o’clock, with a camp meeting scheduled at five, and he handed the boy a jug. Rowbottom almost fell from the improvised dais half a dozen times. He made twice that many conversions.

So if it wasn’t drink, he began to wonder if his special vocation might have to do with women. There was only one in the uncle’s home town, or one of the sort he had in mind, and Rowbottom set out with a characteristic vengeance to redeem what he took to be her unwittingly strayed soul. Surprisingly, the whore proved interested in the notion herself, or so it appeared when she cooperated to the extent of letting the boy talk himself hoarse for three consecutive hours, and even supplied him with whiskey of her own when it became evident that this was what primed him. But then when he was barely able to keep his feet she locked the door and proceeded to teach him a thing or two about what he thought he had been talking about. “So I got to marry you,” he said, “as a penance. It’s the sole way to salvation, fer the both of us.”

The woman threw him out then, but he persisted, if limited to remonstrance from beneath her window now. And when even a bucket of slops over the head failed to deter him, she at last seemed to capitulate. “All right,” she told him, “since it looks like I either got to be saved from ordinary everyday sinning or else have murder on my conscience to boot. Tomorrow then. You come back tomorrow night and we’ll get fixed up.”