Robert Coover - Ghost Town

Now, holt on a minnit, mam—!

And lookit the dirty pitchers they drawed all over my butt! says another, raising her skirts, which look more like window curtains, to show him her hairy behind, vividly decorated with a sacred buffalo-mating effigy. It’s a outrage is whut it is!

Now dammit, mam, yu jest git covered up thar!

Yu gotta do sumthin about this dreadful tribulation, sheriff! cries the chanteuse.

I’m tryin to!

Us proper ladies jest aint habituated t’sechlike incivil misabuse! cries the tall greasy-haired crone in the housecap. Our innercent little coosies is bein sorely afflicted!

A sweating one-eyed mestizo lady takes off her pink bonnet to fan her bald head and growls out: Show him, Belle! Show him whut them crool savages done to yu!

Well, first thing, the barroom singer says, is they hogtied me over a hitchin rail like this! She bends over the rail, her breasts spilling out, and takes hold of her ankles, while some of the other matrons tie her up there with some old frayed rope they’ve found in the street. They toss her black skirts up, tug her drawers down, pinch and palpate her exposed parts, and prod them with their brooms and pot handles.

Yow! howls Belle, twisting about on the rail in agony, her swaying breasts sweeping the street. This jest aint tasteful, sheriff! This aint how it oughter be!

He steps down off the porch to bring an end to this dismaying exhibit, but his deputy restrains him and the women push him back up again. Yu pay attention now, sheriff, says a squint-eyed old biddy with handlebars, burying her long warty nose in Belle’s hind cheeks, but dont git too close in. This here is ladyfolk bizness.

Well jest so nobody dont git hurt here, he says uneasily, and all the women laugh at that, showing the gaps in their yellow teeth.

Dont want nobody gittin hurt ! hoots the one-eyed mestizo lady and, stuffing a black cigar in her stubbly jowls, she rears back and gives Belle’s upraised hindquarters a resounding smack with a butter paddle. The humpbacked granny follows, switching the chanteuse with a handful of wooden splints pulled out of her slat bonnet, and the others join in with whatever they have to hand from gunbelts and frypan spatulas to horsewhips, razor strops, and soup ladles, Belle screaming and yelping with each blow: Oh them dirty heathens! Jest lookit whut they done t’me, sheriff!

Some of the women now have their skirts up and are slapping at their victim’s exposed behind with their own nether persons as though to parody the savages’ final indignities, and Belle is groaning and grunting and sobbing something heartwrenching. A most perturbatious sight t’behold, remarks his deputy, unbuckling his gunbelt and stepping down off the porch.

Awright, awright, dammit! he yells. I git the pitcher. His deputy is already down in the hot street, half his fat bum on view, but he pulls up short and turns back, holding his pants up with both pudgy fists. So whuddayu spect me t’do about it?

We want a little lawr’n order round here, sheriff! croaks the squint-eyed old bird with the unholy nose, still whumping away bowlegged at the chanteuse’s backside, her thick bloomers around her scrawny ankles, the tips of her handlebar mustache rising and falling with her movements like greased raven wings. We want justice! Ungh! We want some— whoof! — dead injuns!

All the womenfolk take up the cry for blood and justice, rattling their pans and broomsticks and firing off hidden pistols, raising a grave agitation. He figures it’s about time to retire from this line of work and is fumbling with his badge when his deputy, buckling up, hollers out: Enuffa this pussywailin, yu ole scuzbags! Jest holt on t’yer britches thar’n let the sheriff’n me parlay a minnit! And he drags him into the jailhouse doorway and whispers dankly: I reckon it’s high time t’call fer a posse, sheriff.

He nods, sighs. Not much choice. The badge won’t come off. Snagged on something. As is he. How it is out here on the edge of things. He remembers something he once saw on a suicide’s tombstone in Boot Hill, some Boot Hill: HE COME OUT HERE TO BE HIS OWN MAN BUT HE COULDNT NEVER DO NUTHIN THET WARNT NEEDFULL UNTIL HE DONE THIS AND IT WARNT NEED-FULL NEITHER. TOO BAD. RIP. He turns and, thumbs hooked in his gunbelt, faces the crowd. The womenfolk are all gone, except for the dancehall chanteuse, who is still hogtied over the hitching rail, and the street is full of men and horses.

We’re rarin t’go, sheriff!

Yippee! Lets git humpin!

He would, for he’s obliged, he knows, but can’t. Sorry, boys, yu’ll hafta go off without me, he says.

Caint do thet, sheriff. Aint a proper posse without yu.

Well too bad. Caint do nuthin about it.

Sheriff aint got a hoss, boys, his deputy explains.

No? Whutsamatter with him then?

I thought he wuz sposed t’ride the white stallion.

Thet’s right, whar is thet fastuous critter? Go brang it to him, deppity.

The prospect of seeing the white stallion again, and moreover of mounting it, enlivens him and somewhat reconciles him to riding out with the scalping party. The animal looks a bit different in the sunlight, however, more like an old swayback mule in truth, though at least it’s white. No tack, not even a saddle or a bridle, just a piece of rope looped around its knobbly withers. Takes him a couple of tries to get seated, and by the time he’s accomplished it the posse is nothing but a puff of dust out on the far horizon. He gives the decrepit old thing a sharp spur in the flanks and they lumber off in that general direction.

Yu take keer now, sheriff hon! the chanteuse calls out from between her legs as he plods past her, her milk-white arse aglow in the noonday sun. All us righteous folk is leanin on yu!

Shore. Watch yu dont git blistered up, he says.

His old mount must have a short leg. No matter how many times he points its nose away, the town is always over there to his right like they’re circling it. Or rather, like they’re on the rim of some wheel and the town’s the hub, for it keeps rotating with his own sluggish progress, showing him always the same distant view of the chanteuse’s tiny glowing butt over the hitching rail in front of the jailhouse, nailed there like a WANTED poster. A most desolate and desolating sight, that pitiful town, clumped there on the vast empty plain like debris blown together by a passing wind, but it won’t go away. Finally, having long since lost sight of the posse and weary of jerking on the rope and kicking the beast beneath him, he gives it over to a peculiarity of the landscape and continues on whatever way this sullen creature means to take him. Once, when he was still alone out on the desert (it comes back to him now, it was either before or after he shot his mustang), he came upon the skeletal ruins of an old covered wagon lying on its side, half buried in the sand. There were only a few tatters of canvas left, no cadaverous remains or abandoned chattel; it had been picked clean long ago. What was memorable about it, though, was that one of the spoked wooden wheels was still slowly turning in the dead air, round and round, as though recalling the clocking of time when there was time. He’d sat there for some time in the saddle, staring at that grinding wheel as if to stop it with his thoughts and so bring this misadventure to an end, but the longer he watched it the further he seemed to be from it, until it wasn’t there anymore and he was moving along again and that town over there was shimmering on the horizon, imitating a destination.

Now, as he winds round it, he hears gunfire, hallooing, the thudding of hoofbeats up ahead, though there’s nothing to be seen to account for it, whatever it is evidently obscured by a slight rise in the land which he hasn’t noticed before. As they trudge up it, it seems to deflate, collapsing back to level flats once more and revealing an old wooden shack all shot to splinters, an old fellow sprawled on the ground in front of it. He pushes his sluggardly rackabones up to where the old man is lying, or maybe it goes there by itself, and he leans over and asks him if he’s all right.