David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

But he was not to achieve the coast, and only in part because old habit had made him too frugal to pay for more than piecemeal passage. It was at a meal stop some hours shy of a place called Yerkey’s Hole, which marked the limit of his current ticket, that nemesis entered Hoke Birdsill’s life to alter it for eternity.

Hoke was the only passenger on the run, and he was eating without haste since the horses were likewise to be fed. So he was still at the table when the gelding cantered up outside the cantina and the youth dismounted. Hoke recognized the fringed red-and-yellow Mexican vest at once. “Why, howdy there, Dingus,” he called.

“Well, will you look at Hoke Birdsill in the dude’s duds. You come into some riches now, did you?”

“A middling piece of luck,” Hoke allowed as the boy joined him. Hoke knew him only slightly, from random saloons. He thought him a pleasant lad. “Jest passing by, are you?”

Dingus gestured vaguely with a hand that Hoke now saw to be bandaged, or rather it was the wrist. “Thought I’d mosey over west fer some sporting life, maybe. Like as not try some stealing here and there too, I reckon.”

“I heard tell you’d gone bad,” Hoke said. “What do you want to perpetrate things that ain’t lawful for, now?”

Dingus removed his sombrero, fanning air across his merry face. “Hot, ain’t she?” he said. “Tell you the truth, Hoke, I don’t rightly approve on it much neither, but a feller’s got to live, and that’s the all of it.” He indicated the damaged wrist. “Sort of trying, too, what with lawmen taking pot shots at you like they do.”

“Honest Injun?” Hoke’s own forty-four had never served to enter contest with more than an occasional rattlesnake.

“Weren’t nothing, really,” Dingus said.

But abruptly Hoke grew uncomfortable. “That sure is a handsome-looking derby hat,” the lad was adding. “Always did want to git me one of those, and that’s a fact. Let’s try her, eh Hoke?”

“I reckon not,” Hoke said hastily. “I shed dandruff pretty bad.”

“Let me jest inspect how she’s manufactured then. I won’t put her on.”

“I reckon not,” Hoke said again.

“Well, now. And I always pegged you fer a accomodating sort of feller, too.”

“A man’s clothes is his castle, is all,” Hoke said, abandoning his meal. He called the proprietor. Deliberately, he withdrew a billfold in which he carried some seven paper dollars, allowing Dingus full scrutiny as he settled his accounting.

“Don’t look like much remaining of that there luck,” Dingus speculated.

Still distressed, Hoke said, “I were ill a spell in Fort Worth. I had to go to four doctors in one morning, it got so bad.” He arose all too casually and strolled toward the stage.

“Ain’t gonter climb back aboard without a pee, are you?” Dingus inquired, idly walking with him. “Gets right shaggy in a feller’s crotch, he sweats in a dusty coach all morning. Nice to air her out, like, even if she’s only got a little trickling to do.”

“I reckon you got a point,” Hoke admitted. They accompanied each other to a rear wall, reaching to unbutton in tandem.

“Jest keep a good strong holt there, Hoke,” Dingus suggested then.

“Huh—?”

But it was far too late. Jerking his head just enough to see a revolver in the hand he had trusted to be otherwise occupied, Hoke urinated on his boot.

“I’ll jest take a loan of that there derby hat, I reckon,” Dingus decided. “A desperado’s a desperado, but I kin leave a man his final few dollars, seeing as how you was sick.”

Terrified by the looming weapon, though heartsick over far more than Dingus knew, Hoke closed his eyes as the outlaw reached to the derby. He sobbed miserably as his eight hundred dollars fluttered from within it to the ground.

“Well, howdy do!”

“Aw now, Dingus. Aw now, Dingus—”

Dingus was already squatting. “Back off there a step like a good feller, will you, Hoke?” he requested. “You’re dribbling on some of my new twenties—”

So when he found himself stranded in Yerkey’s Hole there was no saloon to be opened — nor would there be a bed either, or not for long. But there was still the job of sheriff” to think about, urgently now and with certain expectations as it developed also, since the local man had only then struck it rich in the nearby mines and headed back east. Hoke sought out the town mayor.

“Who’re you?” the mayor said. “C. L. Hoke Birdsill,” Hoke told him. “Never heard of you,” the mayor said. “Is that important?” Hoke wanted to know. “Of course it’s important,” the mayor said. “What we do, we pick some outlaw with a real foul reputation for meanness, usually some killer’s been drove out of some other town and decides to raise a ruckus here. Safest that way. How do you think they picked that Wyatt Earp, over to Tombstone?”

“Oh,” Hoke said, ‘Svell, no harm in asking.”

“No harm ‘tall,” the mayor said. “Go get yourself a reputation, like say that feller Dingus Billy Magee, you mosey on back and we’ll make you sheriff in jig time. Right smart derby hat you got on there—”

And then it was the derby that saved him. Or rather the local madam did, once she had seen the hat.

Her name was Belle Nops. Hoke had met her on occasion through the years, although as a cowhand he had never spoken more than a dozen words to the woman, and those stricdy business. She intimidated him, as she did virtually everyone else. No one knew where she came from, although she had been something of a legend in the territory for a decade or more. She might have been forty, and she admitted to having been married once, if obscurely. She had arrived in Yerkey’s Hole with one covered wagon and two girls, both Mexicans, and had set up business in a tent near the mines. Now the tent had long since become a house of exceptional size and intricate design (evidently it had been built originally to accommodate six girls, with new rooms added haphazardly and askew as the six became twelve and fifteen and twenty; finally there were even additional stories) replete with saloon, parlors, and piano. Some of the girls were white these days also.

Not that Hoke could afford any of either classification in his present circumstances. So he was both confused and complimented when she propositioned him. “A manager?” he said. “Me? And anyways, what kind of a job is—?”

She was a bawdy, overwhelming woman built like a dray horse and homely as sin, almost as tall as Hoke himself, if with an astonishing bosom nearly as famous as her house. Hoke had been in the bordello itself perhaps three times during his first week in town, and then only to nurse a solitary glass of cheap Mexican pulque in its saloon each time, nor was he conscious that she was even aware of his presence until she appeared at his table peremptorily and without preliminaries on the third of those nights to say, “You, Birdsill, down on your luck, ain’t you? Come on—” She led him to a large room at the head of the main stairway which he expected to find an office and did, with a scarred desk in one corner and with a safe, but which was her bedroom also. Beneath a canopy of a sort Hoke had never seen except in pictures was a bed of a size he had not dreamed imaginable. He could not take his eyes from it. “What kind of manager?” he asked.

“Them duds,” she told him. “Listen, if there’s one thing on this earth a frazzle-peckered cowpoke or a dirty-bottomed miner respects, it’s somebody he instinctively thinks is better than he is. You hang around in those fancy pants and you won’t even have to tote a gun half the time.”

“Gun?” Hoke said. “Oh. What you mean, you want somebody to hold the drunks in line?”