Robert Coover - Ghost Town

He drops the hacksaw back into the crock of beans as the deputy rises boozily from his chair and staggers over to unlock the cell. Yu got a awful purty stink about yu tonight, Belle.

Well yu kin have a lick in a minnit, deppity. Jest lemme git these here togs back on thet scoundrel, I’m sicka seein him walk around near stark nekkid like thet. It aint civvylized.

His buckskins, he sees, have been dyed black. They wuz too dirty to warsh, she explains, I hadta color em. She has also brought him a broad slouch hat, gloves, neckerchief, and boots, all black as well. Even the longjohns are black. She peels the tattered pink bloomers off him and tosses them out the cell door: Here, go sniff these whilst yu’re waitin, deppity! The man, cross-eyed with drink, catches them, peers at them woozily, turns green, and stumbles out the door to vomit in the street. While he’s gone, the chanteuse, tugging the longjohns up and snuggling his bruised eggs in with particular tenderness, whispers: They’s a hoss and weepons waitin fer yu outside thet winder, darlin. Now haul the resta yer livery on and git outa here whilst me’n the deppity says our prayers. I’ll meet up with yu later.

But whar—?

Dont worry, handsome, she grins. I’ll find yu. Yu caint git lost.

A lot of things happen and then he’s alone and forsaken on the desert again, sprawled out under the black canopy of night, starving, parched, hurting too much to get up and move on but a dead man if he doesn’t. Not a calamity out in these parts of course, the more serious concern being the loss of his hat and boots on the wild gallop out of town on the back of the black mare. That creature, after effecting one rescue, has tossed him here and abandoned him, flat out, useless, and in need of another, on what an old furtrapper come down out of the mountains once called the dry skin of the ineffable, which back then he thought was a Sunday way of saying the unfuckable.

One of the things that happened was that, while Belle serviced the drunken deputy behind his desk (We dont want thet wild desperado gittin over-roused, do we, she said with a wink his way, pushing the ugly man down out of sight), he picked up his boots and crawled out of the cell window, which turned out to be a story higher in the back than out front; he could see the horse waiting for him down below with his gunbelt over its rump, so he just let go and dropped, slapping into the saddle like a ball into a leather glove. It hurt but not as much as he’d feared, though probably the most recent punishments he’d endured had set new standards. But if the horse, a shapely coal-black thoroughbred, was willing to play catch with him, she was less inclined to take him anywhere, impassively ignoring his most desperate urgings. He wheedled, kneed her, clucked his tongue in her ear, snapped the reins, commanded her in a barking whisper to giddyup, smacked her haunches, and cursed her like the black devil she was, but she only turned her head and looked at him wistfully, or else in reproach or disappointment.

Over at the saloon meanwhile a brawl had broken out, a fight over the reward money as best he could make out, or maybe they’d been gambling for it and someone had cheated, and it was now spilling out into the street. There were fistfights and gunfire and thrown bottles and chairs and the shattering of windows and mirrors and, mixed in with it all, a drunken agitation for a lynching boiling up: It’s thet goddamn hoss-thievin ex-sheriff whut’s fucked us up! Lets go drag the mizzerbul whelp outa thar’n string him up! Yo! He’s ruint this town! C’mon! Lets git the sumbitch! But still, even as the turmoil spread ominously in his direction, the mare just stood there, stock-still, eyeing him melancholically over her shoulder, and he began to wonder if maybe the saloon chanteuse, more embittered by her thwarted wedding party than she was letting on, had set him up for something even more harrowing than a legal hanging. Git goin, damn yu! he cried, but the contrary thing wouldn’t. He felt like braining her with something, but she was all he had so he gritted his teeth and leaned forward and stroked her sleek black neck and begged her earnestly to fetch him out of this hellatious dusthole before it was too late, whispering in her erected ear that it was just the two of them now, his fate was in her hands — or hoofs, better said — and if she wanted to stay and get killed like a damfool, well, he could abide by that, for him it was better to get shot up out here in the street than to swing like sausage from a rope, but there was no need for her to suffer such grievous shit, no need for either of them to, because there was still time and plenty, but they had to step lively — and pronto! — and as he talked she began to paw the ground and snort and toss her head and he told her she was the most beautiful horse he’d ever seen but he wouldn’t care if she were the ugliest whangdoodle in all creation, he’d still love her, if only she would kick up her heels and hightail her sweet arse out of here, and the next thing he knew they were miles away, streaking through the desert night so fast it was all he could do to hold his seat, his eyelids pinned back, teeth bared behind blown-open lips, the new hole in his ear whistling, his clothes ripping in the wind. Then, as suddenly, they stopped and he somersaulted right on over the mare’s head with his forward momentum, landing where he lies now, flat on his back, staring up at the indifferent stars, hatless, bootless, unarmed, and unable to imagine ever rising again, the mercurial black mare long since vanished into the night, as though, having brought him this far and dropped him, her job was done.

Well, he’s been thrown off horses before. Breaking broncs is part of who he is, what he does. Or used to be, do, best he can recollect, his memory about this residing mostly at the base of his spine and now freshly jogged. But it’s been awhile. That mustang he rode in here was probably the last one he broke. If he ever really did. Wasn’t easy. It had been living wild and had acquired fixed notions about anybody sitting upon it. Which, not caring to be sat upon himself, he could respect, but only up to the point where it started to hurt. That horse would stand still as stone and then would suddenly unwind like a clock spring, throwing a body every which direction, no two of its feet hitting the grit at the same time. It whirled, sunfished, high-dived, and back-flipped; it was like riding the end of a whip or trying to cling to a cliff face in an earthquake. With the cheeks of your backside. He got bucked into mud holes, cactus patches, manure wagons, and bonfires, once even up a tree. And he got mad. Goddammit, it was either him or the horse. He had himself lashed to the stirrups and saddle with the intention of riding it all day and all night for as long as it took. How long that was he can’t say, but it seemed like a lifetime, a bone-breaking nightmare that would never end. He came to one day at the bottom of a ravine in a pile of brambles, still tied to the busted tack and the horse quietly grazing on the hillside overhead.

The horse had bested him but they got on after that. Partners of a sort. Neither of them went back to where they’d been; he wouldn’t have known how to find his way back had he wanted to. Instead, they just kept moving, a pair of fiddle-footed ramblers, following the wind, until that drifting brought them out here. To the desert. Where now, somewhere, a coyote yaps and a lone wolf howls. A not too subtle reminder. That he’s meat. And the desert’s dry belly on which he lies is hollow and full of a restless insatiable hunger. Even now he feels that belly rumbling faintly beneath him, hears it: some animal stealthily approaching . He has no weapons, not even his bowie knife, but whatever it is will not get a free meal. He lies deadly still, trying to estimate how far away it is and just where it’s coming from, sniffing the air for a clue, gazing fixedly up at the night sky, wishing it were a mirror. No movement up there tonight, the stars are all nailed in their places, but they are flickering as if they might be loose and could easily fall out. He concentrates on them, as though he might unplug one with his gaze alone. And then, to his startlement (he cries out) he does, or seems to, but it misses his predator and lands on him instead. But: not a star. No. He’s been hit in the face with a boot, his own boot. Standing over him is the black mare. She’s come back. Her coat is wet with sweat and there is foam at the corners of her mouth. She drops the other boot, his hat, his gunbelt, the sheathed knife.