Robert Coover - Ghost Town

Well well. Mornin, sunshine. He opens his eyes a slit. It’s the saloon chanteuse standing in the doorway. Some doorway or other. Yu two sleep well?

He’s lying on a rancid old mattress with straw ticking and rags for blankets, but it’s more easeful than the desert floor or a jolting saddle, to which he is more accustomed, and he has slept hard. And long: must be the middle of the day. His companion in the bed is the black mare, lying on her side with her back to him. He rolls away from her and sits up, still trying to recall the dream, but it’s mostly gone. Can’t remember how he got here, either. Here being a dilapidated wooden shack, badly shot up and with half the roof gone. His boots and buckskins have been removed; he’s wearing only a black union suit and a neckerchief.

I wuz havin a dream about my father, he says with a precipitous yawn, as the mare rolls heavily out of the bed behind him and clops outside to do her morning business.

Do tell. Nice feller?

Dunno. Never knowed him.

The chanteuse, standing in the noonday sunlight coming through the roof, is rigged out today in a fancy black outfit of her own: shirt and short knee-length skirt with beads and fringes, high boots, six-shooters on her hips, and a flat black hat with little crimson tassels hanging from the stiff brim, matching the ruby in her cheek. I mean in the dream, she says.

Caint recollect. I think he tried t’kill me.

Musta been him, awright. But git yer boots on, cowboy. Dont want the lawr t’ketch yu here.

Caint think how I got em off. Whar we goin?

She puts a black mask on over her eyes and hands him one like it. Yu’re a famous badman now, darlin. So we gotta round us up a gang a sneakthiefs, gunslingers, and short-iron specialists and go do some killin and robbin.

While waiting to waylay a train that night, he and his band of outlaws, all hard men wearing black hats, sit around a campfire on top of the railway tracks they’ve scouted out, while the orange-haired chanteuse, now a bandit queen and perched high on the day’s pile of loot, sings them sentimental old ballads about lost solitude and soiled doves and tipi-burning in the untrodden vales of purple sage, and about dirty dealing and dysentery and wick-dipping in the old corral with its rivers of blood flowing beneath the whispering cottonwood trees. They’ve been out robbing stores and banks and killing people all day and they’re all a bit trail-weary, grateful for this restful interlude, and when Belle sings about the hanging judge who hanged a whole town, they all sing along (even he joins in, though he can’t sing a lick) as she lists the victims, each verse adding two or three more — He hung the teacher and the preacher and the Chinese prostitute! He hung the rambler and the gambler and the pegleg in his boot! — then in unison shout out the chorus: But he never hung me! And they laugh and spit at the fire and pass the whiskey bottles, reckless violent men of good spirit.

His black mare is curled up beside him by the fire, allowing herself to be used as a backrest and a shield against the elements. The place they have come to is bald and open to the four winds, which are all active on the night, blowing dust up their noses and whipping their hats off. They have to keep an eye on the campfire that blown embers don’t set the dry scrub ablaze and spoil their robbery plans, but they need the light from it so as not to lose sight of the train rails, which have been eluding them all day, slippery as watersnakes. It has taken hours hunting them down to this lonely spot, and then thanks mainly to his black mare who led them here, following a spoor of fine cinder, after the rails they’d been tracking had seemingly dead-ended in a waterhole. Even here, the rails have tried to slither away, which is why they’ve built their campfire on top of them: if they shift again, they’ll all shift together.

Most commonly after so long in the saddle, getting his thighs buffed and his prostate spanked all day, he’s pretty sore, finding sitting down and standing up equally insufferable, but the mare is an easy ride and if anything he feels better tonight than when the day began, no new torments and his old wounds and bruises mainly healed as though gently massaged and oiled away. She’s fast, too, and fearless, coolly outrunning the bullets shot at them today as they galloped away from trouble, and she can fly over fences and chasms, take any incline or crisis in her stride, turn on a nickel and leave four cents’ change. They had to kill a few breachy clerks, shopkeepers, and deputy sheriffs during the day’s adventures, but the only serious trouble they had was when they were robbing black hats from a dry goods emporium and ran into another gang robbing the same store. During the explosive shootout that erupted, the mare slipped in and stole all the hats, rescued him from where he was pinned down behind the calico bolts, and, stomping a few heads along the way, led the whole gang in a clean getaway. Almost clean. They lost a couple of men to the hail of fire, but members of the rival bunch later offered to join up with them if they could have a hat, so they are back to a full complement again.

Now one of the new members of the gang, a rangy white-shirted and black-vested dude with muttonchops, sleeve garters, and spectacles like two dimes on a wire, interrupts the bandit queen’s legs-up number about skylarking range tramps on a bunk-house toot to complain that his hat doesn’t fit him properly. It sets down on my ears sorta funnylike, he grumbles.

Dodblast yer peculiar pitcher, growls a black-bearded hunchback, and he pulls out his walnut-handled pistol and shoots the man square between the dimes. Belle wuz singin.

Hole on thar, Bible back, says a swarthy squint-eyed fat man with a cigarillo dangling in his scarred puffy lips. Thet feller was a pal a mine. Yu didnt hafta kill him jest on accounta he busted in on a fuckin song.

No? The hunchback turns his pistol on the fat man. Yu want yer turn, buzzardbait?

The fat man squints expressionlessly down the barrel of the pistol, dragging slowly on the cigarillo, his hands tensed on his knees. Yu rather hold over me, podnuh. I reckon I caint call thet hand. Ash blows from the reddening cigarillo in the coiling wind. Ante’n pass the buck.

The buck aint fer passin, puffguts, and the ante’s yer ass, says the bearded hunchback, cocking the hammer of his pistol.

He gets up from where he’s been lying against the black mare, walks over there, ready to shoot them both if he has to, at the same time that the bandit queen climbs down off the pile of loot and interposes herself between them, her tasseled sombrero tipped sternly down over one brow as if to say she means business. We aint got time fer no hossshit bickerin, boys, she says, cuffing their ears so sharply she knocks their hats off. He reaches down and takes the hunchback’s gun away from him, uncocks it, empties the chamber, drops it back in his lap. Now I want yu two bigmouth jackasses t’shake’n make up.

Aw Belle…

C’mon now, aint no point argufyin the question, she says, giving them another slap. Thet train’s due by here any minnit. Yu in this gang or aint yu?

Ow! Shore, Belle, but—

Then git to it.

Well. Well awright, dammit, I’m sorry I shot yer bud. It wuz jest I wuz so wound up awaitin fer thet cussed train.

It dont matter none. T’tell the truth I couldnt hardly suffer thet dandified turkeyass anyhow.

Thet’s a whole sight better, boys, says the bandit queen, ruffling their hair, and she climbs back up on the loot and tunes up her guitar, while he rests down against the mare again, fingering the gold ring that Belle stole earlier for the bullet hole in his ear and reflecting, as he watches the stars get whipped about by the winds, on the way his own days seem to blow past him out here as though on those winds, and his memory of them, too, swept away as if they never were, leaving only a lingering constellation of habits and impressions that constitutes his dim untidy notion of himself; and constellations, as a crusty old scout once pointed out to him, do not really exist but are merely the local illusion of earthbound ramblers. That’s what he said, and it seems likely so. Which means he knows nothing, and sometimes less than that when confusions beset him. One impression that the day has given him, for example, is that he probably takes more favorably to breaking the law than to preserving it, but that preference is muddied by a troubling disquiet of the heart, the nature of which he suspects but cannot quite take in, for he has always known himself to be — by trade, druthers, and constitution — a free man and a drifter and a loner, not susceptible to such perturbations. But all that was before he laid eyes on the town schoolmarm. He can still see her, tied to the railroad tracks, so sad and sweet and needful a creature wriggling around down there. In short, his constellated notion of himself be damned, he may well be (though that’s just it, he can’t be) in love, and here, astray outside the law, it’s a love utterly denied him. Them rails hummin yet? Belle asks.