Robert Coover - Ghost Town

The bottle is empty. He tosses it away, listens to it clatter over the parched earth, a thin paltry sound that makes his eyes ache. He’s all alone, lying on his back with his hat over his face to shield him from the blazing midday desert sun. He can see, peering out into all that light from under his hat brim, that the men of his posse, what was once his posse, have cleared out and taken their herd with them, nothing left of them but for a few bleached bones and a charred place where the campfire was. Plus a saddlebag. He doesn’t want to know what’s in it. He struggles painfully to his feet, trying not to fall over again; his head weighs a ton, hard to keep it on his shoulders. Near him, half buried in the sand: the skull of a steer gazing up at him with empty sockets, a note stabbed onto one of its horns. We’re over yonder , it says. Come find us ifn yu’ve a mind to. Any extry hand welcum. Yer pals the x-posse . There’s a P.S. on the other side: Watch out fer thet rattler residin in the skull, it’s a real mean fucker . Too late. Its fangs are already driven deep into his inner thigh, its flat glassy-eyed head as big as an old scuffed boot lodged there in his crotch, its huge striped body wriggling wildly between his legs like a freak dick from a carnival sideshow. The dull ache in his head is immediately replaced by a sharp ferocious pain throughout his lower parts. His chaps and buckskins should have protected him, but the big snake has struck in the soft part of his thigh, and now its fangs are helplessly locked there in flesh and leather. He whips his old staghorn-handled bowie knife from its sheath and cuts the rattlesnake’s head off at the throat. The headless body twists and thrashes on the ground, but the severed head, even after he stabs it between the eyes, continues to gaze up at him from between his legs with a look commingled of regret, familiarity, and grinning defiance. He rips it out and tosses it away but the fangs remain like steel needles driven to the bone.

He unknots the chaps and tears at his buckskin breeches, but they’re a tight fit; he can get them down off his butt but not past the snakebite on his thigh: they’re like a second skin. Already his thigh and groin are swelling up and changing color and he’s starting to feel sick. He knows he should suck the poison out but the bite’s in a place he can’t reach, even if he could get his pants down. So he cuts into the punctures through the pantleg with his bowie knife and squeezes the blood and pus out as best he can, feeling his whole body begin to puff up and turn feverish.

He figures he’s done for, but then he spies the town over on the horizon, shimmering in the heat. It’s his only chance. He tosses his gunbelt over his shoulder and, in a cold sweat, staggers off in that direction, stumbling, falling, picking himself up and carrying on. The poison’s getting to him. Sometimes the town is out there, sometimes it isn’t. He sees a soft quilted bunk that fades into sagebrush when he reaches it, a watering hole which turns into a dry gully when he falls into it, mouth open, face in the sand.

Lying there, grit in his teeth, he seems to recollect — it’s sort of a memory and it sort of happens — accompanying a wagon train of emigrants heading west across the dusty plains. He might have been a hired gun or a scout or he might himself be one of the pioneers, it’s not clear, but their passage takes them through endless black acres of burnt-out prairie grass, dust churned up by the wooden wheels so thick wet bandannas tied over their faces cannot filter it out (he can taste it, coating his tongue, clogging his throat), the teams of oxen plodding through it all, their hickory yokes squeaking, chains rattling, and there’s the tinkling clatter of tinware, the shriek of ungreased axles, the squalling of children; he can hear all this. Storms suddenly rise up out of nowhere and sweep wrathfully down upon them, lightning bolts slamming the ground around them like electrical cannonballs, and then as quickly they sweep away again, leaving the land as hot and dusty as if no rain had passed.

In the calm after one such storm, just as they are crawling out from under the oiled canvases of their wagons, they are attacked by a band of screaming wild Indians on horseback, emerging as though out of the vanishing storm itself, their naked bodies striped head to toe with red and black paint, their long ebon hair floating to the wind, bald eagles’ feathers on their heads and strips of flayed antelope skin and white feathery skunks’ tails strung to their knees and elbows — they make a sight to see, though looking can get a person turned into a human pincushion. Already the settlers are falling — men, women, and children, their horses and oxen, too — with arrows through their throats, chests, and eyeballs. He seems to recognize them all but doesn’t know them, except for that beautiful widow woman in black, the schoolmarm from the town up ahead, moving among the fallen, treating their injuries, consoling the dying, keeping wounded and orphaned children distracted by teaching them their ABCs.

He’s having a hard time thinking, he hurts so badly and feels so sick, but he manages somehow, hitching about on his one good leg, wincing with pain and nausea, to get all the covered wagons snaked round in a circle, tongues chained to rear axles, as a makeshift breastwork against the incessant hail of deadly arrows. The clumsy wagons teeter and tip and Dutch ovens, rocking chairs, and butter churns spill out like peace offerings, plows, skillets, chamber pots, and bucksaws, a proliferation of translated merchandise that dizzies him, or perhaps exemplifies the dizziness that besets him. He and the remaining settlers knuckle down — he hears cavalry trumpets in the distance but they are stifled mid-toot, hope lost, they’re strictly on their own here — to the business of killing savages, which they accomplish in great numbers; popping them off their ponies is like swatting flies, but they keep coming at full gallop in wave after wave, blowing war whistles made of the bones of eagles’ wings and whooping and hollering like a troop of demons, all the while showering arrows on them so thick and fast the day turns dark, until soon there are no settlers left but himself, and he’s got an arrow piercing his inner thigh, a poisoned one by the swelling sensation of it, and his mouth is full of sand.

He figures he’s done for, a feeling he might have had before, but then the schoolmarm passes, scowling down at him where he lies as though offended by what she sees. I’m sorry, mam, he says, or thinks he says, it’s all fading away. He knows he must be all swollen up and ugly looking down where the arrow’s sticking out, and he’s not sure his pants are all the way on. No matter. She produces a pair of scissors and cuts them away entirely, rips out the barbed arrow shaft like yanking a weed, then strips off one of her black stockings and ligatures his naked thigh with it, providing him just the briefest glimpse of a tender bare calf under her dark skirts, which makes him feel like crying, or maybe the pain does. She digs and snips at his wound with the scissors, then stoops to suck the venom out. The arrows are still whizzing overhead but they seem to be rising higher and higher until they are all but out of view, up where the hawks hover. He can hear her sucking and spitting, can see the tight dark bun of her hair bobbing between his thighs, but he cannot feel her lips on him, everything’s gone dead below the ligature. Not above it, though. Where her hand is. When she’s done, she cleans the wound with some warm liquid she’s produced from somewhere, salts it with a white powder the color of potash, and pours something like diluted ammonia down his gullet, making him gag. While he’s still spluttering, she shoves a long dull needle in so tender a place just above the wound that he cries out like one of those shrieking savages who have just passed by, injecting him with something from a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones. Hush now, she says, and she unties the ligature to use the stocking as a bandage, often brushing as she works the thing standing nearby, the only thing standing in fact for miles around. Before rising and leaving him there, she gazes at it sorrowfully for a moment, as if it’s about the saddest thing she’s ever seen.