David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Dress?” The captain frowned then. “Trunk? Well, surely now, there was a dress. I mean there was a girl, if that’s what you mean. Why, she passed us not twenty minutes ago. As a matter of fact I thought she might be in distress at first, but she told us she was just rushing off to get married. But I don’t understand what—”

But Belle had already spun back to the surrey. Half boarded, she paused anew. “One hundred dollars for each man!” she shouted. “Or hell’s bells, never mind that — there’s that nine thousand or more in rewards for the first one puts a bullet up his giggy. But on top of that I’ll—”

She did not have to pursue it. Only Captain Fiedler hesitated briefly. Then he too had whirled his mount and was pounding after the others.

Nor could the surrey keep up, of course. So half an hour later they were still steaming across the broad vast mesa itself, in full daylight now and some moments after the troopers themselves had disappeared far ahead where the road twisted northward into an abrupt high upthrust of stone hills, into a defile, when they heard the shooting, the rifles. “Git ‘im!” Belle shrieked instantly in approval, harrying the thundering mares even more hysterically, “—git him good now! Fill the miserable meat-beater so full o’ lead even the vultures’ll vomit when they chomp on him!”

“But—” Hoke swallowed in disappointment, reading the same probability into the sounds and certain then that his own meager claim to the rewards was being irrevocably superseded (not by any means accustomed to the idea of a marriage that would render them inconsequential yet, either). But then he became moderately perplexed as well. “Because lissen,” he yelled, or tried to over the horses, “how long kin they keep plinking at him in there anyways? How much of a fight kin he—?”

Because the firing still went on. As a matter of fact it cracked and volleyed so incessantly that if he hadn’t known better Hoke would have estimated a good many more than ten or a dozen rifles to be involved. “My gawd,” he commiserated then, “they truly must be massacrating the misfortunate critter at that, the way they’re—”

“And I say more power to ‘em!” Belle dismissed him. “Pulverize the twerp!” she screamed enthusiastically into the wind. “String him up by his prunes and take target practice! Pop so many holes in the varmint he’ll leak until hell sprouts flowers!”

Except it wasn’t Dingus.

It took only an instant, less than that, as the surrey finally careened into the gorge itself amid high sheer walls, as it screeched precariously around the first unnavigable turn and into sight of the troopers at the same time, for Hoke to understand it had to be something different, something more. But then he was too busy to look, snatching at the reins where Belle had suddenly abandoned control in favor of the brake now but missing them completely as the amok vehicle pitched and lurched and twice almost overturned completely, stopping only after it had slewed about in a full circle to wedge itself against stone. Hoke was already leaping from it before that, however, as the bullets whined and ricocheted about his fluttering skirts, diving for shelter behind boulders where the troopers themselves were pinned down by the relentless fusillade from somewhere beyond. He buried his nose into the shiny blue serge of the soldier across whose sprawled backside he had landed, too startled to be shocked or terrified yet, although hardly failing to hear Belle’s own instantaneous new outburst despite all. “Indians?” she roared at Captain Fiedler. “Indians? Now great bleeding eardrums, it was you yourself jest said there ain’t a hos-tile Indian within six counties of this place, so how could—”

“Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly call these peaceable,” the officer yelled back, scarcely in need of the irony as a new hail of bullets whistled and chinked overhead. “But at least they’ve most likely done us the favor of dispatching your outlaw friend for you, since he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of us coming through the—”

“But my trunk!” Belle wailed. “My safe! Where’s—”

And then the shooting stopped, abruptly but absolutely. Hoke himself had not previously moved, save to dissociate himself from the trooper’s bottom. But when the silence persisted he finally raised his head, finding the others near him beginning to better deploy themselves also, behind what appeared a fairly secure natural barricade, a fortuitously banked upheaval of jagged split shale. “And now what?” Belle was demanding. “What are they—?”

“Just regrouping, I’d imagine,” Captain Fiedler speculated. “Or maybe debating an attack, since it’s pretty much a stalemate the way we’re situated at the moment.” Hoke could see the youthful officer kneeling, eyeing the terrain. Then the man turned to his sergeant, indicating something behind Hoke himself with a gesture, speaking more quietly.

Hoke saw it also, however, comprehending. Close at hand, yet probably obscured from the vision of the Indians themselves, a narrow crevice broke upward through the shelving toward higher ground. And almost immediately the sergeant darted toward it, obviously for purposes of reconnoitering.

“I’ve got a hunch we can outflank them,” the captain elaborated. “It might work if we’re not too badly outnumbered, which we don’t seem to be. Let’s hold fire and wait, now—”

So they sat. Nor did the Indians renew their own fire either, except for those moments during which random troopers showed themselves fleetingly, evidently satisfied merely to hold the patrol at bay. Then for some moments only Belle’s irrecusable mutterings alone punctuated the calm:

“That lamb-ramming, rump-rooting, scut-befouling, fist-wiving, gopher-mounting, finger-thrusting, maidenhead-barging, bird’s-nest-ransacking, shift-beshitting, two-at-a-time-tupping lecherous little pox. On top of which he wasn’t born either, he was just pissed up against a wall and hatched in the sun. I’ll—”

But the sergeant finally reappeared, though it struck Hoke at once that something boded ill. In fact the man made his way toward them so thoughtfully, and in such evident distraction, that he almost exposed himself more than once. And then when he reached the captain for a long moment he merely stared, not saying a word.

“Well, drat it all, did you see them, man? What’s the—” And still the sergeant seemed wholly disconcerted, although at last he nodded. “I saw them. Yessir. Right clear in fact. But—”

“And? So? Can we take them? Can we get—”

“We could take them easy. Yessir. But the thing is, we can’t. I mean we can’t fight. Because—”

“Can’t fight? Says what? There aren’t that many of them, are there? And if there’s a good tactical approach from—”

“It ain’t that,” the sergeant said, although still he seemed incapable of coping with whatever it might be instead. “I mean we don’t even need tactics. But that’s the whole point.

I mean, it’d be almost too easy, because it ain’t Injuns. I mean, I reckon they’re Injuns all right, but—”

“Listen now, listen!” Captain Fiedler struggled to check his anger. “Sergeant, are you sick? Will you for heaven’s sake tell me what’s—”

“It’s squaws.”

“It’s — what?”

“Squaws. Ain’t one single buck warrior down there; not a one. You kin hang me for a chicken-stealer if’n every single Winchester ain’t being shot by a female. And—”

“But — but — ambushing a patrol of United States Cavalry? Squaws?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Well, it don’t sound no more loco than it looked, I reckon. But it’s even more loco’n that. Because there’s some men down there too, all right, maybe ten or a dozen of’em, but they ain’t fighters — jest the old limp-dicked kind you see on reservations, maybe. And there’s a decent-size remuda likewise, like the whole outfit’s migrating somewheres, or was, until say no more’n ten or fifteen minutes ago. But now there’s this one tepee sort of half throwed up against a couple of trees — more like a improvised lean-to is what you’d call it — and there’s this buck-board setting near it. With that there wardrobe trunk still on it, yes’m. But what I mean, all the old men are doing, they’re loafing around like somebody told ‘em they had to wait on something for a spell, while over by the lean-to — well, there was this one squaw, real purty young wench too, jest getting herself all stripped down bare-titted and crawling inside. So it’s only the other sixteen who’s deployed out behind them boulders keeping a bead on us, and—”