Robert Coover - Ghost Town

Reluctantly, he takes up the platter being forced upon him. The grinning men cram around the table to witness this refection, licking the greasy fingers of their free hands, sucking bottles dry.

Keerful, boy! Dont grease up them new buckskins!

Aint they purty! Soft as sateen!

Soft as the schoolmarm’s crupper! Aint thet right, kid? When he doesn’t answer, they ask him again: Aint thet right , kid?

Caint say, he replies cautiously, picking up the dubious repast and sniffing it. Aint never seed the schoolmarm’s crupper.

That sets them all to howling and hooting and shooting off their firearms. If he could throw them off guard somehow, he still might get out of here, but he cannot think what might now surprise them. Awright, now tuck in thar, dammit, growls the rangy scar-faced man with the gleaming dome when the ruckus dies down, pointing at the plate with the barrel of his gun, afore yu git us all riled up!

The testicles have the outward savor of gristly sponges soaked in urine with a strong whiff of the mustang’s asshole clinging to them, but he holds his breath and shoves them in, all the while watching his watchers for some lapse in their red-eyed attention. If he’d had some hope of passing this ordeal quickly, that hope soon withers. The tough rubbery scrotum will not surrender to his grinding teeth and in the end, so as not to throw up, he has to swallow the bloody mess whole, a process that seems to take forever and he thinks might kill him. Certainly any notions he may have nurtured about whipping out his new six-shooters and blasting his way out of here are entirely undone by the suffocating nausea that grips him and makes his knees buckle. He closes his watering eyes to concentrate on the simple task of ingurgitation and when, the lump sliding bellyward at last, he opens them again, he finds that his gunbelt and buckskin breeches have gone missing and a passageway has opened up from the table to the grand piano. What’s worse, he has been overtaken by a terrible prurience, so powerful and disturbing that that threat of hammering silver studs into his organ, so suddenly engorged now, seems less a menace than a means of relief. It feels as if it wants to burst right out of itself like a sausage puffing up on the fire.

Haw! Looks like them hoss balls done the trick!

Time fer him t’meet the marm!

The table is tipped from behind; he falls, smacking his bare nates on the tabletop, skids to the floor. At the far end of the aisle, in great distress, held down on the piano by the men of the saloon, is the pale widow woman he has seen twice before. He stumbles toward her, intent on rescuing her, or pretty sure he is, poked and prodded from behind, tugged forward by his own quivering member. She is weeping, her limbs outpinned, tossing her head from side to side, her tight dark bun coming unraveled in her anguish, her black dress twisted around her body. She cries out in alarm when she glimpses the enflamed state he’s in, wrenches away, begging for mercy. Dont worry, it’s awright, mam, he gasps, gripping the offending element in both fists, but he’s not certain that’s true. He can’t even hang on to it; it keeps jumping out of his grasp with a prickly life of its own.

Thar she is, kid, snarls a scrubby little wall-eyed runt with side-whiskers. Go git it!

I caint! I–I jest had some!

No, y’aint, says the scrub, his eyes rolling in contrary directions. Not none a this , cowboy.

Nobody has, son. We been savin her back.

Her bodice is ripped open, her skirts flung back, exposing the webbed complications of her underclothing. And also the proximity of her flesh, the awesome profundity of it, beneath this frail wrap. It is that wrap, that delicate black armor, that he is determined to protect, with his life if need be, even as his hands, unbidden, rip it to shreds. He clenches them into fists to bury the clawing nails and the fists punch the air wildly as though trying to escape the governance of his arms. Dont be skeered, mam, I wuz jest leavin, he wheezes, as his hips slam in between her forcibly spread thighs with the power of a bucking bull, his body’s uncontrollable violence terrifying him as much as it does the agonizing woman below him.

Hell fire, whutsamatter, kid? Dont yu know whar t’stick the fuckin thing? grumbles a goateed fat man in a black string tie and gambler’s broadcloth coat. Irritably, the man flicks away his cigar butt and takes hold of the bucking organ to steer it in. That does it. His flying fists have been just aching to reach out and bust something solid: in relief, he wheels now and slugs the fat man so hard in the face he drives his red pocked nose completely inside his head; he has to give a hard yank after to suck his fist out before the fat man keels over backwards, his goatee now poking up like a feather duster over the puckery soft hole between his eyes, which have come together like kissing billiard balls.

Though for a moment the blow liberates his mind and hands from their tempestuous assault, it doesn’t stop his member from seeking out its target on its own. As it batters at her portal’s last velutinous defense, she looks mournfully up at him and begs him to pray with her, please, before fulfilling his desperate designs, and she nods toward a Bible lying beside her on the piano top. My pleasure, mam, he gasps, his hands grabbing up the Bible as though to tear it to shreds (has he already breached her last line of defense? something soft, furry, wet—!) and inside it, buried in cutaway pages, he finds an old pistol with a black leather handle — he whips it out and blasts away at the lowlife surrounding him, starting with the drunken rubes pinning her limbs. The dead ones go down like lead sinkers and the live ones scatter as though blown out of the place by a high wind and he feels a prodigious heaving in his loins that blinds him momentarily with its explosive intensity.

When he opens his eyes again, sprawled out on the grand piano with his bare butt in the air, the saloon is empty except for the dead bodies lying around like lumpy gunnysacks and the hunchbacked piano player, sitting alone at the keyboard in his yellow suspenders with a hand-rolled cigarillo dangling from his liverish lips, knocking out a little tune which he recognizes as a taunting nursery song. Even the beautiful widow woman is gone, all evidence of his powerful emission likewise, the Bible, the black-handled pistol, the fearsome prurience. But his buckskin breeches are back, draped over a nearby chairback, along with his gunbelt and fancy new weapons, his white kid gloves with the fingertips cut away.

Whut’s yer relationship to the lawr, kid? the piano player asks him around the bobbing tobacco stick as he rolls off the piano lid and goes over to haul his golden pants up and strap the belt back on. The children’s song has been displaced by something more elegaic. A dirge maybe.

Aint got one. Yu the sheriff?

Nope. Jest a deppity. We’re a mite short on sheriffs. Yu lookin fer work?

I dont think so, he says, but he sees he doesn’t have much choice. There’s a badge already pinned on his fringed shirt: a bent-tipped star pierced by a bullet hole and black with blood.

Howdy, sheriff.

Yo, sheriff, how’s tricks?

The men in the street greet him affably and tip their hats as he and his deputy step out of the saloon onto the wooden sidewalk in the glazed light of midday. He touches the brim of his tengallon in reply, his other hand clutching his cocked rifle, unsure as yet of the men’s true intentions. They are dragging some portly redfaced man in a crumpled top hat and three-piece suit toward a gallows that is still being knocked together in the middle of the dusty street.

Whut’s happenin here? he wants to know, for he reckons it now to be his office to inquire into such civic doings.