David Markson: The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Ain’t said one word about being anxious. Jest a mite curious, is all.”

“Well, shut your yap then and leave me do it my way.”

“Don’t look like much of a way, jest ducked down here back of a cow.”

So it might have been ten minutes, perhaps only five. Turkey continued to hear the dripping, which eventually slowed. Finally he was able to perceive shadows looming nearby.

“Keep me covered good, now—”

“I got dead bead on his skull, Hoke—”

“Well, keep it that way.”

The shadows came closer, with infinite slowness. Then, hovering near him, one of them paused. It hung there for a time, disembodied.

“Dead, Hoke?”

“Oh, that miserable varmint! Oh, that double-dealing, nooky-snatching, sneaky-assed skunk! I’ll — I’ll—”

“What’s that, Hoke?”

“I’ll crucify him! I swear, this time I’ll murder the little sidewinder if’n it’s the ultimate mortal deed I do on this earth! I’ll bend his mangy dong in half and stomp on it like—”

“How’s that again?”

“Ain’t him. Ain’t Dingus.”

“That’s Dingus’s red-and-yeller vest there, ain’t it?”

Turkey Doolan smiled. “He give me the hat too, boys,” he proclaimed. “We was right fond chums, me and Dingus William Magee.”

“Sure, it’s Dingus’s vest,” the voice said, ignoring him. “And that makes three blasted times in six months I done put a bullet clean through the turd-wiping thing, too — with some other hero-worshiping durned imbecile wearing it every blasted time!”

But Turkey Doolan had stopped attending. He listened to the dripping instead. There was little question, it had happened. Turkey was at ease.

As a normal thing, SheriffC. L. Hoke Birdsill affected a cutaway frock coat, striped pants, and a vest with a chain from which the tiny gold star of his office was sported. He also wore a derby, usually brown.

It had not always been so. Indeed, Hoke was thirty-one, and if he allowed himself the vanity of such sartorial excesses it was because until less than one year before he had never owned much more than the shirt on his back, which smelled generally of cow. Nor had he been a sheriff then either.

But then one day he had awakened with a pain in his chest. He tried to ignore it, but when it persisted, and severely enough to keep him out of the saddle, meaning out of work as a trail hand, he visited a doctor in Santa Fe. The doctor diagnosed consumption and gave Hoke twelve months to live.

This staggered him, less because he did not particularly care to die than because he had no notion how to cope with his time until then (he had never been especially burdened with imagination). He drifted to Fort Worth, for no particular reason. He had very little cash, but he took to gambling anyway. So then an incredible run of luck was to dumfound him all the more. Within short weeks he had won eleven hundred dollars, more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life and certainly far more than he would need to get through the remaining days of it.

Perhaps he was conscious of the irony. In any case he decided he might as well live according to his new means, which was when he began buying the clothes. “At least I’ll be buried in style,” he told himself. He was a tall man with a long, leaden face who had always been rail-thin but now believed himself cadaverous, and he grew a mustache also, which came out orange (his hair was quite dark, almost black). He had sold his horse and saddle and virtually all the rest of his gear, save for a single Smith and Wesson.44-caliber revolver in its sheath that he infrequently wore. He took to strolling considerable distances about the town or sitting wordlessly on his hotel’s porch. Probably he looked thoughtful. Possibly he was. He wrote the projected date beneath his signature when he made arrangements with a bewildered local mortician and paid the man full cash in advance.

Then one morning he sat bolt upright in his bed some hours before dawn, startled by a realization that should have come to him weeks earlier, even before he had arrived in Forth Worth. His room was chilly, but when he undid his long woolen underwear, clutching at his chest, he found he was sweating. By the time he reached the stairway beyond his door, wholly without regard for sartorial propriety now, he was running, sprinting down through the darkened lobby and into the street. The nearest signboard he could recall was two blocks away, on a quiet side road, and he achieved it in no more than a minute. It was a woman who finally opened, and had she not been the wife of a doctor for forty years she might reasonably have taken Hoke Birdsill for mad. “Yes,” she said, “all right, he’s dressing, he won’t be a moment, perhaps if you would tell me what it is—”

But he had already sprung past her. The doctor was in his woolens, climbing into his trousers. “I ain’t got it,” Hoke said, or rather sobbed. Only the sight of a second turned-down bed, the woman’s, gave him pause. But if he hesitated long enough to catch his breath he made no move to back out again. “It’s a month and I ain’t,” he gasped. “I got so used to thinking about dying from it that I reckon I forgot all about having to live with it first, because—”

The doctor had paused with one leg raised, gawking. “What? Live with—?”

“Not for a month. More than that. I can’t remember when I had it last. Not when I sold my horse or won all that there money or went to the undertaker’s or—”

“What? Listen now, I still don’t… do you mean to say you’ve come barging in here at four o’clock in the morning to tell me about some pain you haven’t got, haven’t had since… what undertaker? Listen, are you all right? Do you feel—?”

The doctor had to throw him out, at the point of a Sharps Buffalo gun. Hoke did not notice until it finally materialized under his chin. So he waited until six o’clock for the next one, and then he saw three doctors in half as many hours. They all told him the same thing. If they weren’t positive about what it had been in Santa Fe (two suggested indigestion, one ventured gas) they were unanimous about what it wasn’t now. Hoke jumped a stage before noon.

He returned to Santa Fe first. He found the original doctor, in the same office. “That’s a shame,” he told the man, “you ought to have been gone.” The man did not recognize him. “Birdsill,” Hoke said. “C. L. Hoke Birdsill. I’m gonter die in ten months from the consumption.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the doctor said, “I remember now. Well, and how are you feeling, Mr. Birdsoak?”

“Fine,” Hoke said, “and how do you feel, Doc?”

“I?” the doctor said, “oh, I’m fine, fine, never sick a day in my life.”

“You know the date?” Hoke asked him, “today’s date?” The doctor glanced at a calendar and read it off. “Remember it,” Hoke said. The doctor was an unassertive soul, an Easterner, and he began to tremble the moment Hoke took hold of his shirtfront. “Keep it in mind good,” Hoke said, “because on this same day next year, one full year from today, I’m gonter come back here and shoot you square between the ears.”

“But you’ll be dead by then yourself,” the doctor protested. “Then you’ll be jest lucky” Hoke told him.

Yet the truth of the matter was that Hoke actually owed the man a debt of gratitude, a fact which dawned on him about now. He was through punching cattle, nor was it simply a matter of the clothes. During his stay in Texas he had also discovered he liked the feel of a bed.

The next coach he took was posted for California. He picked California mainly because he had no idea what was to come next in his resurrected life, and that appeared as good a place to muse on it as any. One notion that had crossed his mind was that he might open a saloon. Another was that he might serve as a peace officer somewhere, though he had no idea how one went about this last. He had some eight hundred dollars left.