Robert Coover - Ghost Town

It’s the marm she’s after!

Give her over, sheriff! Dont rile thet savage critter up no worse’n it is!

Now hole up thar, damn yu! he yells at the maddened mare. Yu back off! Yu wanta stomp sumbody, yu pestiferous jughaided scrag, yu stomp me! The horse blows through her nostrils and bangs the floor, and arches her head back so far toward her tail all he can see is her black throat, and lets out a whinny more like a quivering howl. Then she drops her head down between her knees and peers at him beseechingly from under her forelock, scuffing at the floor planks with one hoof. Awright, thet’s better. Now git outa here, he says. She swings her head from side to side, her lips curled away from her teeth, her damp gaze now more aggrieved than defiant. Git! He lowers one of the pistols and fires a shot that nicks the dead toe of her hoof. She raises it from the floor, bends her head toward it, sets it down again, and, after a mournful pause, turns to plod slowly, nose down, from the room. Someone fires a shot, she staggers slightly, pauses, then continues on her deliberate way. The rest of the men, emboldened, grab up their weapons and start shooting wildly at her as she lumbers past, following her on out the hole in the wall where the door used to be, shouting curses and blasting away.

He helps the schoolmarm to her feet, feeling tender toward her as before, all the more so as her high-collared bodice has come unbuttoned and there is a sweet powdery smell emerging from the glimpsed whiteness within that unhinges his articulations in a way the mare’s assault or any other could never do. Her own hand, however, is like a stiffened claw and is instantly withdrawn, the sentimental mood clearly no longer upon her. Why didn’t you shoot that wicked beast? she cries. In the street, he can hear the men doing just that, the explosive rattle of their barrage like a fireworks display, and for the second time in so short a while, a wetness mists his vision. She was trying to kill me!

I dunno, he sighs. I figgered ifn I could calm her down we could mebbe ride her outa here.

What? Leave this town? I could never do that, you fool! Anyway, she adds, glaring with seething fury at the dampness that has crept upon his cheeks, thet aint why.

He says nothing and she slaps him. So hard she knocks his hat off and her own dark bun is tipped askew. Outside, it sounds like the whole town is being torn apart, and inside his breast it feels that way too, for he has beheld the strands of orange curls peeking out beneath the unsettled bun.

And then the uproar suddenly subsides and the men come piling back into the jailhouse, heated up and blustery with the excitement of their kill, a turbid blur before his eyes of hats and hair and noses.

Whoa, sheriff! Yu shoulda witnessed the way thet crazy mare tuck out yer gallows!

Turned the whole bizness inta nuthin but a passel a toothpicks!

Whoopee! Never seed the like!

Obstructin justice, she wuz!

And more holes in her by then than a cribbage board!

She never even tried t’run. It wuz like she wuz plumb heart-sick’n jest hankerin t’cash in!

But it warnt easy! Thought we’d never bring the ole nag down!

Pumped everthin I had inta the colicky critter!

Criminently! She wuz some goldurn hoss!

Course, now we gotta build thet dodrabbid thing all over agin so’s we kin string up this onfortunate buckaroo.

Aw hell, we’ll never git it done in time, thet damned mare has seed to thet. I say we jest fergit it’n go git drunk instead.

Now yu’re talkin, hombre. I wouldnt keer t’put down mebbe jest a jug or two.

Shore, they all agree. Let him go. He aint hardly done nuthin wrong.

No, boys, says the saloon chanteuse, taking the dark bun off to shake her ginger locks loose, one ruby-tipped breast now bouncing free from her undone bodice, yu caint do thet. The scrofulous varmint is broke the lawr and he’s gotta pay fer it.

Aw, Belle, he aint but only a killer, hoss thief, cattle rustler, trainrobber, ‘n card cheat, whutsa harm in thet?

The sumbitch jilted me, she says bitterly. Hangin’s too good fer him.

The men glance wearily at one another, their shoulders sagging. Shit. Yu shore, Belle?

I’m shore.

Awright. Better go rustle up some hammers’n nails, I reckon.

Thet wood out thar’s all kicked t’smithers. We’ll hafta rip down the stables’n start over.

Sorry, sheriff, says a baggy-eyed oldtimer with a scar running across his bulbous nose from ear to ear like a clothesline for his beard, and now wearing the deputy’s badge. Aint nuthin we kin do. He strips him of his sheriff’s star and weapons. Better git yer pore fucked butt inta thet cell thar, whut’s left of it, and behave yerself whilst we git on with whut we hafta do.

Whutsamatter with him anyhow, deppity? someone asks and they all turn toward him. He’s watching her fasten the ruby pin into place in her pierced cheek. And reflecting on how he was never really cut out for the civilized life and how considering for a moment that he might be was a weakness and a flaw in him, a fatal one as it turns out. The jasper looks like a mule jest kicked him in the cods.

It’s Belle. Seein her fitted out like thet.

And now that horizon that was always out there for him is there no longer, and the vast horizon of his inner eye has also withered away.

I’m gonna miss yu, darlin. The chanteuse smiles, tucking her breast in but leaving the schoolmarm’s bodice unbuttoned. Aint ever day someone like yu comes driftin through.

It is not every day, he corrects her, and goes into the cell to flop down on the bare springs of the cot there.

No, haw! She laughs, they all laugh. Shore as hell aint!

He remembers that when the men went out to rebuild the gallows he looked up through his cell window from where he was lying on the cot springs and saw the stars gathered up and set spinning in the sky like celestial dust devils, and he thought: There’s a serious storm brewing. For a time then there was a silence so dense it made his ears ache, and he recalled one hot day back when he was out on the desert alone under the blistering sun and just such a silence descended and in the middle of it a great band of Indian warriors came galloping past, riding bareback and without reins, heads high and staring rigidly ahead as though drawn by something out on the horizon that he could not see, their horses’ hoofs raising a torment of dust but making not a sound. As they flew past, he saw that their lips were all sewn shut with rawhide thongs and their chests and foreheads were tattooed with mysterious pictographs and the teeth and tiny bones of animals were embedded in their flesh, and he understood that they were galloping into oblivion and carrying the secrets of the universe with them, and that although those secrets were not very interesting, they were the only secrets there were, and he would not be privy to them. In their wake came a raging river, snapping wrathfully at their heels and swallowing up their tracks, and then, as the warriors vanished and the common sounds of the desert returned, the river shrank to a rivulet from which he and his horse drank and they were sick for a time.

And so he was thinking about this when the new silence fell as he was lying there on his jail-cell cot on the last night of his life, and if there’d been any sounds of sawing and hammering to be heard before, they were stifled now by this thick clotted silence and then erased by the sudden all-encompassing roar of the cyclonic wind that followed on, sucking the roof off the jailhouse and picking up the old wooden desk and swivel chair and hurling them at his cell bars, exploding them to splinters that flew at him like darts and arrows, and he curled up with his arms over his head, giving them only his butt to strike at, it being well tanned to leather from his life in the saddle and more or less immune from punishment. The wind brought with it great slashing torrents of burning rain that bit and chewed at him then, with its driving force more ravenous than a pack of wolves, and when the rain had passed the distressed stars fell out of the sky in a shower of meteors that shook the ground and rattled the cot springs, pitching him, stunned, to the floor. And then the dust and earth and busted stones sent flying by the meteors and stirred up by the bellowing wind came rolling over him as though the desert itself had taken animate shape and had risen up against him, and it buffeted him and blinded him and entered him through all his orifices, stopping up his mouth and nose so he could not breathe, and buried him there where he lay. But he is a man schooled to the harsh and whimsical ways of the desert, so patiently he waited out the turbulence (the worst was over, the marm had left him, and she was not even the marm), meditating the while upon the ironies of his extremity — that he was holding his breath and struggling to survive so that he might live another hour to be hanged — and when it had passed he dug his way out and spat out the earth that filled his mouth and unclogged his nose with his fingers and commenced to breathe again as before.