David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“It’s only—” Hoke cut the man off without intending to, the exclamation voicing itself. And then he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Sixteen?” he asked hesitantly. “You mean counting the one in the lean-to, nacherly. You don’t mean the sum total of them squaws is—”

“Jest what I said. Sixteen and one, which if’n you know how to add better’n you know how to git dressed, comes out to—”

But Hoke had already stopped listening. He had closed his eyes also. “Seventeen?” he moaned. “Seventeen?” Finally he faced it again, not able not to. “But jest tell me slow,” he said. “Down amongst the old men, you dint maybe notice one of them chewing on a nice appetizing boiled wood rat, sort offer nourishment betwixt meals? Or if’n he ain’t hungry at the moment, then doubtless he’s still wearing a expensive derby hat anyways, and—”

“Well, yair, come to think on it I did see one with a derby, but what is—”

“Nothing,” Hoke said. “Nothing at all.” His eyes were shut again, and his head was lowered. “Excepting it’ll be at least twenty hours now, or anyways that’s what it took him the last time when they was camped up to Fronteras, and I don’t reckon there’s gonter be none of them let us cut it no shorter neither, not until they all durned sure git their belly-buttons squished out, so—”

But he was not being understood, evidently. Or perhaps he had mumbled even more than he realized, slumped against a rock and not even caring, not for the moment. “Dean Goose?” he heard Belle shouting at him. And then she was shaking him once more too. “Because he’s the greatest what? Who? Now what the blazes kind of word is—”

But this time he didn’t answer at all, already banging his head against the boulder behind him where he sat, quite hard, although quite deliberately also, in that profoundly impotent, ponderous rhythm of absolute and unmitigable frustration, of futility beyond hope. They had to restrain him physically.

And he was right, because it was to be the twenty hours indeed, give or take an apparent meal or two, and by then Captain Fiedler and his troopers would be long departed for Yerkey’s Hole. But there would be another problem then too. Because it had been approximately six o’clock in the morning when it commenced, and at dusk, at twilight, it was only the twelfth squaw who was emerging from the tepee, the thirteenth who was entering. So they knew it would be under cover of darkness that it would cease. “Or when the damned thing just falls off him altogether,” Belle said.

So when (he next morning came and the Indians were furtively gone at that, and the buckboard at the same time, without there having been a single sound for Belle or Hoke to hear, without a trace now either, there was only one boon, one saving grace. There still remained only the one direction for him to have taken with his burden. At the crack of dawn, and with the further benison of well-rested horses, they were storming after him again.

“And I’m even almost glad,” Belle said. “I almost am. Because this time I’m gonter have less mercy than a aggravated rattlesnake. I ain’t even gonter kill him now, not right off. I’m jest gonter bury the little pee-drinker up to his neck Apache-style and prop his mouth open with a stick and let the ants do it. As a matter of fact I’ll sell tickets.”

Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.

They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”

Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge

the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”

They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”

So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:

“Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”

“And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”

“Yet it frightens me at times, the extent of our obsession. Why, even that young girl these people are following, would you believe that even she reminded me of him slightly?”

“Oh, but by now he must be far too manly to resemble any young lady—”

“Of course, it was only illusion. But I’ve longed for him so deeply, so deeply—”

“I too, I too!”

“Well, shall we move on, Miss Youngblood?”

“Let’s, Miss Grimshaw.”

Hoke strolled back to the surrey.

Three hours later it happened. Afterward, Hoke would find it difficult to remember how, since he was never aware of the exact point at which logic ceased and the other, the intuitive, took hold.

Because he had been squinting ahead at the abandoned farmhouse for some time before it did. They were going fast also, passing only the first of the once-cultivated fields in fact, and there were no signs at all, nothing to indicate that Dingus had even taken this same road, let alone might have stopped. Yet suddenly Hoke knew, felt it even before realizing that he felt anything at all, because his left hand had already lifted involuntarily to obstruct Belle’s right, staying the whip. “Hang it,” she demanded, “now what the—?”

And then it must have been in his face too, the same certainty, although he still could not have explained, nor did he even glance toward her. But somehow there was contagion in it, in his posture alone perhaps, because Belle slowed the team at once. The house itself was roughly a hundred yards off the road, the gutted barn beyond that, and they were only now abreast of both. “What?” she whispered. “Do you see—?”

They went another thirty or forty yards before they stopped completely, and after that several moments elapsed in which neither of them moved, in which only the horses snorted and heaved in their traces. Belle was clutching her shotgun. A single jay swooped by in the heat, in the hot bright calm afternoon glare.