David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

She had six or eight of her better clients in on it by then, one of whom happened to be the local justice of the peace, the rest ostensibly serving as witnesses. Rowbottom himself failed to discern how any of them were expected to fulfill the latter function in a room where all the lamps had been extinguished, but the woman insisted. “It’s more romantic in the dark,” she assured him, even squeezing his hand, although the ceremony did not take long anyway. But then when a lamp finally did go on the whore lay doubled up on the floor laughing and the hand he now found himself clutching belonged to a squat, dumpy, incredibly square-headed Indian girl, a Kiowa apparently and obviously as befuddled as Rowbottom himself, if also too drunk to stand.

He was in Sweetwater, Texas, a month after vaulting the whore’s window ledge, when he glanced up from a pulpit one evening to find her gazing at him blissfully from the rear of his newest congregation, unpresuming actually, and with the expression on her quadrangular face very much like wonderment at her own temerity, but at the same time waving a small, folded, and already long filthy paper that he understood from the length of the room away would be the certificate, the Oklahoma license. It was only chance that the first horse he spied belonged to a federal marshal. And even then Rowbottom was another full week’s ride removed in less than four days, but they had telegraphed ahead.

So he was on the rockpile when the voice came again. This time it said only, “Wait, now,” but he might have anticipated that. He had been given ten years.

Two years after he got out he was still waiting. But then when he happened upon Yerkey’s Hole, finally, at long last, he began to sense a certain urgency again, a renewed purpose, although he could never fully grasp it. But even the town’s name was a hint. “Yerkey’s Hole,” he asked someone. “You mean it were a famous water well?”

“It were a whore,” he was told, “name of Yerkey.” So when he started to preach at the brothel, it was in the realization that he had best keep his hand in. Because it could not be long now.

Then something horrendous happened to him. He had been in the town perhaps a week and was strolling aimlessly one evening, passing an abandoned suder’s wagon, when she loomed up from the shadows behind it. “You want bim-bam, mister?” she asked him. It was dark, and it had been exactly twelve years. But there was no mistaking that blunt, flat head, that squat form. Rowbottom almost collapsed on the spot.

But a miracle occurred. She was peering directly at him, seeming almost to study him even, yet no recognition crossed her face at all, and when she persisted in hailing him it was only in regard to her original proposition, her modest semiprofessional offering. Rowbottom ran into her several more times in the next weeks, once at last deliberately approaching her wagon in daylight, but by then he was positive she had forgotten. “So that’s a sign by itself,” he decided. “Because she must of been brung here special, jest for me to understand I’m truly released of that one trivial burden now. Which doubly indicates there’s got to be a momentous new Call acomin’, and pronto.”

So he had been waiting more anxiously than ever tonight, listening with palpable concentration, after he found the vest. And then when he gave up again temporarily, he put on the vest itself only because wearing something, for a man minus one arm, had always struck him as more practical than carrying it. He thought he might sell the garment at the same time he pawned the pistol. That he tucked into his waistband.

So at first, approaching the wagon, he thought it no more than the usual solicitation, although it did strike him as curious that she carried a shotgun.

Then Rowbottom halted, still some distance away beneath a rapidly diminishing moon, remotely curious yet not hearing her too well either, and wondering what had happened to her usual wares, since what she attempted to merchandise now seemed limited to a “mean goose.” But something turned him wary also. “You run pretty damn fast,” she went on incomprehensibly, and still from quite far off, “for a feller squish out seventeen bim-bam in twenty damn hours, oh yeah. But I think I damn catch you this time, you betcha.”

Rowbottom knew a moment of debilitating uncertainty. Could he have misinterpreted the signs somehow? Was this some mysterious new revelation, a delayed recognition after all? He was backing off slowly, not yet completely panicked, when suddenly she sprang.

His stride was still extraordinary. But luck was with him also, since by the time he paused for breath, a good half the town away, not only did it appear that he had lost her but the moon was fully hidden now as well. He waited until he was certain there were no further sounds of pursuit, then ventured on toward the main street. “So maybe His scheme is jest more complicated than I knowed,” he was thinking. “Because if’n I got to move on, it were right accommodating of Him to hold off on informing me until I had that money from the pawning almost to hand.”

So then she shot at him.

Now this was a development considerably beyond any possibility of immediate analysis, although Rowbottom retained the presence of mind to start running again first, before pondering it. Actually he had not seen her this time at all. But when a second bullet proceeded to gouge a foot-long sliver from the planked sidewalk directly ahead of him, just as he bounded through the spillage of light from a saloon doorway, he stopped long enough to disengage the Colt from his trousers and fire once himself, if only into the affrontive blackness.

Whereupon a blast from the shotgun slammed and clattered about him like the ultimate Wrath. Rowbottom got out of there without further contest then.

He shed himself of the vest as he went now also, realizing that in any light at all it rendered him far too inviting a target. “Anyways I reckon I got the point of it by now,” he said. “Not jest git, but git quick.” But he held up guardedly in a stand of pines for at least ten minutes before daring even the rear alleys again. Then, making his way stealthily through some cottonwoods behind the bordello, he almost took to his heels one more time, although the furor was only Belle Nops herself evidently, and one of her uglier girls, departing hastily in a surrey.

Then a further and even more portentous aspect of The Scheme was revealed to Brother Rowbottom. For reasons fabulously beyond his own imagining, in the ill-kept yard behind the house someone had discarded a spanking outfit of men’s clothing, lacking the trousers but with each remaining item almost miraculously a perfect fit and all of them far more expensively tailored than any he himself had ever possessed. Only the derby hat gave him pause, but not for long. “Because it ain’t fer me to go questioning His helpfulness,” Rowbottom declared. “And if’n He deems I got to approach that there new calling in style, well that’s jest Hoke Birdbugger’s poor lookout, I reckon.” So he had just stepped into the shaft of lamplight from the open upper doorway, the better to contemplate his transformation, when she hove into view again.

Rowbottom’s pulse skipped, even as he commenced to grope hopelessly for the pistol that still reposed among his other clothes some feet away. But Providence had not yet ceased to work its wonders: not only was she no longer carrying the shotgun, but she came plodding toward him so forlornly, and in such abject spirits, that it scarcely seemed credible she had ever pursued him with violent intent at all. In fact when she finally noticed him she reacted to his presence with a gesture almost of resignation. After which she actually shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said, “so I don’t get Dean Goose, greatest bim-bam there is. So I back to you again, you dud-cartridge son-um-beetch. And I think it damn past midnight now too.”