Robert Coover: Ghost Town

How did he come to such a place? Perhaps he lost his way, or was sent by the army, or was chased by lawmen, or went in purposeful search of some secret treasure or his own self-knowledge, or perhaps he was captured and dragged to this alien land, stripped, bound, spread-eagled on the desert floor to be tortured and killed, only to be rescued at the last moment by the great chief’s only daughter, straddling his condemned body with her innocent one, staying her father’s hand with her tender plea as she knelt over him, dressed merely in her tinkling shells and beads, a rare sight unseen by him just so before, and one that, in spite of the extremity of his circumstances, arouses in him a most profound agitation, the evidence of it rearing up before their astounded eyes like a hostile totem erected on the arid plain — which in turn arouses in the men of the tribe a contrary emotion and, in a rage shared by all of them, a young brave, one of her brothers, or a suitor, or both, staggers forward with a tomahawk to chop down the hateful thing. To save it from destruction, or simply to hide it from view, the beautiful pagan princess impales herself upon it, screaming with the sudden pain, her coppery back arching, blood dribbling in a hot stream down over his groin. Like a baptism, he thinks, a blessing, a sweet salvation, his pinned body gratefully discharging its own boiling fluids like a surging revelation into her moist interior. No choice now. He’s set free, yet unfree: one of them.

Life with the tribe, which follows as a river follows its bed, is, though always harmonious in this idyllic wilderness, not always painless. To initiate him into their exemplary ways, his new brothers play face-kicking, fire-throwing, and dodge-the-arrow games with him, rub him with skunk oil and hang him upside down in the sun without water and food for a week, cage him with rattlers, pierce his scrotum with sharpened hawk quills, chop off one of his fingers, and send him out to wrestle buck naked with a seven-foot black bear. They display their own scars and mutilations to show he isn’t being picked on, it’s all just for fun, part of their guileless way of life. While educating him in the art of scalping, they provide him with a wild coyote to practice on, failing to inform him that it is usually judicious — a lesson he learns almost immediately while losing a second finger — to kill the scalp’s owner before trying to slip a knife in under its hairline, the consequences of his ignorance providing further entertainment for his stony-faced but attentive pagan brothers.

Everything here gives delight or else fuck it, that’s the essence of their religion, as best he can understand it. The white baby, for example, adopted survivor of some massacre or other, perhaps the same one in which he himself was captured — if — is a favorite tribal toy until its colicky crying disturbs the sleep of his Indian maiden’s chieftain father, whereupon he is called upon to swing the squalling thing by its feet against a tree and bash its little brains out, which is one of the easier tasks they ask him to perform. Compared, say, to the hard work of skinning buffaloes, then curing their heavy hides, stitching them into tipi covers, robes, and winding sheets for the dead, turning the bones into knives and arrowheads, hoes and dice, the fat into soaps and the tongues into hairbrushes, the paunches into water buckets, the sinew into bowstrings and tipi thread, and the scooped-out scrotums into hand rattles. All this, with typical patience and forbearance, the tribe teaches him how to do. Likewise how to slit throats, impersonate animal spirits, break mustangs bareass, wipe snot on dogs, woo his love on a magical flute with songs borrowed from the rutting bull elk, eat nits out of his own armpits.

The young Indian lass meanwhile loves him openly, freely, with a love as pure and as wholesomely naive as this land of her birth is free of the evils of the civilized world from which he’s come, as evidenced by his telltale pallor and embarrassing ignorance of wigwam etiquette. She feeds him and bathes him and dresses the wounds inflicted upon him by his brothers and ornaments his naked body with horned caps and silver pendants on rawhide thongs and bear-claw necklaces and welcomes him generously into all her orifices. She cures his bellyache with skunk cabbage and wild mint, sucks out his earwax, tells his fortune. She looks into his hands and his eyes and the entrails of a dead badger and prophesies that, after many moons have passed, his old life will beckon him once more and he will abandon her and his newfound brothers and sisters and so cause her to die of a broken heart, if worse does not befall her. He does not believe this, and tells her so while beating his chest in the manner that he’s been taught, yet somehow, he knows that it is true.

First, however, they must marry, something he mistakenly supposed they had already done, and in preparation for this event a special purgative ceremony is required, known as the dance of the errant bridegroom. The medicine man cuts holes in his breast on either side of his two nipples and skewers the holes with wooden pegs attached to rawhide ropes, and he’s made to dance at the end of the ropes until the pegs pop out. When they don’t, they hang him by the ropes to the central pole of the medicine lodge, his ankles and privy member weighted down with buffalo skulls (a form of mercy, his brothers assure him, with commiserating nods and unsmiling winks), until they do, while the older warriors prod him rhythmically with spears and arrows to the beat of a tomtom and carve religious symbols in his buttocks. Fortunately, after the first peg rips out, he’s told, the second follows quickly, but meanwhile the pain is such he is only conscious part of the time, drifting in and out of nightmares about the corruptions of civilization and the horrors of the cosmos as depicted by the animal kingdom and visions of the future as foretold by his bride-to-be: yes, he will leave her; the terrible pain engulfing his heart tells him so. Perhaps he will say his sad goodbyes while lying beside her in the beech woods, in which the squirrels skip, the wild deer browse, and the wistful redbird sings. Or while enjoying her from behind while she is bent over at the riverbank, laundering her father’s ceremonial shirts and breechcloth, riding her horse-fashion and pulling on her braids like reins. Or perhaps he will wait until they can share one last delectable bath together. She has predicted his eventual farewell, it can come as no surprise, and yet her beautiful face seems to darken and flatten out with the shock when he tells her, her eyes to narrow, her cheekbones to rise in rage, her lips to thicken with an unspeakable fury. The next thing he knows, her powerful hands are at his throat and he is far under water, fighting for his life. He flails about desperately but cannot seem to find the rest of her, just her sharp-nailed hands closing around his windpipe and pressing him deeper and deeper— No! Stop! (glub!) I’ll (blub!) stay! I’ll—

He takes a deep breath and, in the oak-framed mirror, examines his new duds: a fringed and beaded buckskin shirt with matching leggings, soft and bleached a golden hue, glossy new boots with silver spurs, the boots embossed with shootout, stampede, and campfire scenes, a white tengallon hat with silky white neckerchief, and hand-tooled gunbelt. He fills out these things in ways unfamiliar to him, as though he might have swelled up in the long soak. He’s clean-shaven, barbered, and his nails have been trimmed. Pulling on a pair of snow-white kid gloves, thin as new skin, he counts his fingers: all there. His old rags are gone, nothing left of them but for his rumpled wide-brimmed hat, afloat on the soap scum in the wooden tub, and the braided scalp knotted to his new gunbelt. Whereon are also strapped a pair of engraved, silver-plated, ivory-handled Peacemakers and, in its own rawhide sheath, his old bowie knife, wiped clean and polished up so bright he can see himself in its blade, the staghorn handle newly silver-studded as though to marker its most recent history. He fingers all these things speculatively, and also the new Winchester leaning there with its hand-carved mahogany stock and engraved brass fittings, meditating the while upon his old felt hat, once dun-colored, now darker with the water it’s sucked up, riding gloomily on the cold gray surface of the bathwater like a derelict river raft. Or the bloated back of something long demised.