David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

So again Rowbottom had not the vaguest idea what she was talking about, although he was not really listening either, already eyeing favorable directions for flight. And she had begun to stalk him too. But then, backtracking cautiously, he stumbled over the lowest of the bordello’s rear steps.

She was at him with a leap.

Rowbottom bolted upward, the least cluttered avenue. The door was wedged open, or perhaps hooked into place, but he had no time to close it anyway. He dove headlong beneath an enormous disheveled bed as she trundled up behind him.

She stopped just short of his derby, where he had lost it ducking under. “All right, you son-um-beetch, where you went?” she demanded immediately. “Because I pretty damn pooped, chase you, chase that Dean Goose feller from jail before, chase him again when I see damn vest in dark out there, damn near get shot too. So I settle for short end now, be wife to Hoke Birdsill. But right damn quick I think, oh yes, hey. So you drag bumpy ass on out or I come scoot down under — which you want, you son-um-beetch?”

So this time he understood just enough — that she had never recognized him after all, that doubtless the whole ordeal had been just that, a trial, a test of his mettle before the final glorious Calling would be proclaimed at last. So he was free to ready himself now, could prepare for the visitation. “Shucks,” he said, already sliding back out, “you want the sheriff, I reckon, Hoke Birddiddler. Well, I ain’t him, as you kin plainly see. I’m jest acting sheriff fer a brief spell, is all, so he done give me the loan of his duds to make it more official. But if’n you’ll pardon me I’ll jest mosey on along about the outlaw-catching business then, and—”

“Hey?” The squaw scowled at him uncomprehendingly as he retrieved the derby. Then she went so far as to lift the lamp from its stand, peering at him from beneath it. “Sure ain’t Soapy-Tool Birdsill okay,” she admitted finally. “But how come is that?”

But Rowbottom was already edging toward the door, unobtrusively, while she peered and peered. Then, glancing that way to avoid any misstep, perhaps he failed to notice it immediately — the slow, speculative narrowing of the eyes, the hesitant pursing of the lips, the profoundly visible evidence of the toils of elemental retrospection. “One-arm feller?” she said. “Ten times I hear people say it, one-arm, bald-headed preacher feller. Couple damn times I see you too, hey. But where I see you before? What your names, hey?”

And then it came, incredulous and exultant at once, with all the apocalyptic resplendence of a trumpet in thunder: “Rowbottoms! Rowbottoms! Oh, my husband man, from so damn long I damn near forget whole damn thing!” Maybe she realized she had been holding the lamp, maybe Row-bottom did also. Maybe they both saw it crash into the wall as her arms shot outward, scattering fuel and flame alike, maybe they saw the bed blossom like a pyre. “Oh, my husband man!” she cried. “All these years Anna Hot Water wait, dream of first bim-bam with my husband! Who need that son-um-beetch Hoke Birdsill, who want Dean Goose, when I find my husband lover bim-bam again!”

Rowbottom stood for a time transfixed, mesmerized. Then, when he fled, when he devolved through the door, it was with no thought of the stairs at all, but into space, heedless and unfettered, like a man touched by assurances not of this world — like one who has penetrated The Scheme Itself, who is privy to The Very Word. His feet were already moving, however, even in passage, and he was running when he hit.

It was dawn when Belle and Hoke met the cavalry patrol. By then Belle’s rage was insupportable. The moon had reappeared perhaps thirty minutes after they had left the town itself, perhaps twenty after Hoke, chancing to look back, had noticed the fire, and had understood immediately by its very enormity what was burning also, if not how or why. He had said nothing, however, no solitary word, merely casting surreptitious glances across one silk-garbed shoulder now and then as they fled onward, while Belle’s own furious intractable glare remained fast to the trail ahead of them as if fixed there hypnotically, and through all the hours since then the road had stretched before them across the mesa like something unspooled. Frequently in the night’s fresh settled dust they had obliterated recent hoofmarks with their own, had flung their spume across the stark virginal scars of wildly skidding blackboard wheels. But Dingus himself still raced on somewhere unseen beyond them.

So she was reining in the lathered, foaming team the instant the patrol cantered into view, pausing to sob once out of fatigue or possibly dumb rage again, but then had bounded from the surrey and was rushing to accost the troopers even before Hoke himself fully realized they were no longer moving. There were about a dozen riders, led by a captain whose braid Hoke could distinguish even at a substantial remove. Then as they came on in the lifting gray light he recognized the man, a grimed youth named Fiedler. His entire patrol was haggard and spent. The officer recognized Belle immediately in turn (very few male residents of the territory would fail to) but she allowed him no time for pleasantries. “Dingus Billy Magee!” she shouted even before he had halted. “That slimy, yellow-scrotum’d, dingleberry-picking polecat — in a buckboard, headed this way. Did you pass the—?”

For a moment Captain Fiedler simply gazed at her, his lips puckered. Nor was it just puzzlement, mere astonishment at this disheveled and furious yet familiar apparition so frantically hailing him here in the empty mesa at dawn. It wasn’t even the sight of Hoke’s striped pants beneath her dress. Because when he began to curse his sudden implosive anger left even Belle’s protracted blasphemy wan by comparison. “Because I’ll be damned on Judgment Day for a knave,” he explained. “Dingus Billy Magee. Surely. Because ever since we ran into the two of them yesterday I’ve been wondering who he was, where I’d seen him before. Sending us on a wild goose chase after nonexistent Apaches, when there isn’t a—”

“What?” Belle cut in, cried in annoyance, “yesterday? No, I’m talking about today, tonight, right on this road, in a—”

“And I’m talking about yesterday, in the afternoon,” the captain said. “When we were finally on our way into Yerkey’s Hole for a bivouac after a patrol that was already weeks too long and met two riders who told us about a Mescalero abduction raid on a pair of wagons. Wagons that don’t exist any more than the Indians do. Pounding our backsides raw over some saddle tramp’s idea of a joke, and through it all a bell kept ringing in die back of my mind — where had I seen one of them before? The one who called me Fetter-man. Surely. So now I finally remember. It was on a reward poster. The—”

Belle snatched at the man’s pantleg where he sat. “Hang it all,” she demanded, “now what the fornicating thunder do I give a hoot about that? It’s now, tonight, that the mangy little pudding-pounder ran off with my safe and all my life’s savings and — on this blasted road I’m standing an this minute, it’s got to be this road, in a buckboard with—”

But Hoke’s own impatience could withstand no more either. So he forgot why he had not climbed from the surrey to start with, why he had been sitting with a hand shielding his mustache. “In a dress!” he cried. “Don’t forget the—”

He caught himself too late, wilting in mortification as the troopers turned toward him to a man in simultaneous amazement. “Why, you hairy-chested old honey,” one of them started.

But Belle was already back at it. “Will you listen, confound it! Yes, in a dress, him too. And with a trunk, a big wardrobe trunk on the back of the—”