Robert Coover - Ghost Town

Aw, it’s jest the damn banker, sheriff. Taint fair him havin alla money and us none, so we’re stringin him up. The little fat man’s pockets are stuffed to overflowing with stocks and bonds and paper money, and bills stick out under his hat brim and from the tops of his boots. Paper trails him, scattering in the desert wind, as far back as the doors of the bank.

But aint yu sposed t’try a feller afore yu hang him?

Naw, sheriff! Haw!

We aint got time fer thet kinder bullpoop.

Well I aint been in this job long, but thet dont seem right.

Out in these parts it does, sheriff. It’s how it’s done.

Yu aint fixin t’fuck with how things are, are yu, sheriff?

I aint fixin t’nuthin. Jest aimin t’do my job proper.

The mob stands there in his way as though challenging him to give them his approval or face big trouble, their faces obscured in-black shadows cast by their hat brims. He’s not fearful of them, he’s tempted even to have it out with the scum, but they may be right about the law, who’s he to say? he’s new to this line of work. Well awright, he says and clears his throat. Jest this one time, then.

He watches as, grinning their shadowy yellow grins under the fierce noonday sun, they tow the condemned banker through the dust toward the gallows. His scrawny deputy, hunched over beside him with a cigarillo between his liverlips, has remained silent through all this, and he feels uneasy, as if he might have said and done less or more than he should have. So whuddayu figger, deppity? The badge newly pinned to his buckskin shirt seems to lie right against his skin, the rimmed bullethole in it pressed round his left nipple like a hot cookie cutter. Like tying a string around a finger not to forget something and then setting it alight. Whut should we rightly be doin?

I dunno, says his deputy, pinching the cigarillo butt in his thin gnarled fingers. He hacks up a clot and arcs it a couple of yards into the water trough, then tucks the cigarillo back in his mouth. Spect we should mebbe oughter git over t’the bank.

The deputy hitches up his pants and, rocking back and forth on his short bowed legs, moseys off that way, with the sheriff tagging along behind like someone who might belong here. Well, maybe he does. Doesn’t belong anywhere else, and it sure beats hauling his wretched ass all alone across that desert out there. Until now he’s always been homeless as a cloud shadow, as a dying cowpoke he once met described himself while passing on, but whether by choice or luck or nature, he can’t say. Just that he’s always kept moving, as though moving were the same thing as breathing and giving up the one might finish off the other. Maybe that departing poke passed it on to him like an infection or a case of crabs. Though there was a time, he remembers, or seems to, when for a brief space he settled down and took up sheep ranching. He’d won twenty dollars one night in a keno game and bought the whole ranch for that, including a hundred head of sheep, a potato field, a wife, and six or seven kids, counting it a bargain, even though the rancher he bought it from, a hulking blond-bearded man with steel-blue eyes, was grinning when he took his money. He learned the sheepherding, shearing, and butchering trade, worked hard at it, and might well have lived and died a sheepman on the prairie, for it seemed like something worth doing, even if in truth he hated every minute of it. But then one day the cattlemen came and killed all his family and burned the ranch down and shot the sheep and dug up the potatoes and then pissed on everything to kill the grass and spoil the edibles, and that was the end of his twenty-dollar adventure in the granger life. He remembers staring down on that vast expanse of dead pee-soaked sheep like it was yesterday. They lay about like muggy wet clouds fallen from out the sky, as indecorously out of place in those scrubby fields as he was, and, without mentioning their unfortunate condition, he managed to trade them off to a neighbor, sight unseen, for an old broomtail hobbler, and he left that part of the country and never looked back. His memory of the family he had for that time is less substantial. All he recalls is that before they got killed they ate a lot. Some time later, he ran into the man who’d sold him the ranch, and the fellow, who’d gone off to be a lumberjack and work on the railroads, remarked over a friendly glass of whiskey that acquiring property was nothing more than laying claim to a burial plot and so put too early an end to things. Death is more fun, he said with a weary blue-eyed wink, his gun on the table, ifn yu let it sneak up on yu unawares in places where yu thought yu’d ducked it.

He and his deputy follow the trail of paper money through the sunbaked street toward the bank, and as they pass the claims office, which seems to have crossed over the street and turned halfway round since the last time he saw it, he can hear a row boiling up inside. I claim yu’re a nogood snot-ugly varmint, he hears one man holler, and another shouts back: And I claim I’m gonna bust yer fuckin ass! There are gunshots and someone crashes through a plate-glass window.

Uh-oh. Reckon we oughter go see whut’s goin on, deppity? he asks, sweaty kid-gloved hand on his pistol butt.

Now, dammit, sheriff, ifn yu let ever little shit thing distract yu, how we ever gonna git our job done?

His deputy seems to have lost his hump on the walk over and now has to take off his hat and duck his bald head going through the bank doors. Inside, the place is wrecked, furniture busted up and heaped about, windows measled with bullet holes, obscenities all over the adobe walls, and money is lying around everywhere. A little boy comes in behind them and picks up a coin, and the deputy whirls round and shoots him dead. Jest caint abide a thievin brat, he growls around his brown cigarillo, and he picks the boy’s body up and hangs it on a coat hook. His deputy has an ugly scar, he sees now, across one eye and down into the other cheek. He might be hard to recognize but for the yellow suspenders. Y’know, when it comes t’metin out justice, sheriff, he says, the cigarillo bobbing like a wagging finger, yu’d appear a smidgen slow on the draw.

Ho, sheriff, about time yu got over here, greets the bank teller, pocketing his wire-framed spectacles and adjusting his sleeve garters. Whut with all’s been goin on, I aint had no one t’spell me, and I’m sorely pinin fer a quick snort. So how about yu jest take over here at the winder a minnit whilst me’n the deppity go wet the whistle?

But I dont know nuthin about bankin.

Hell, me neither, sheriff. Fuckin mystery is whut it is.

His deputy lays a cold bony arm around his shoulder and, his breath smelling like rotten leather, whispers raspily in his ear: Watch out fer them gold nuggets in thet vault over thar, sheriff. Then he and the teller leave him, heads ducked and laughing bitterly, and he goes over to check the vault: no nuggets, nothing in there but rat turds and a few sick flies. He tries, just the same, to close the heavy steel door, but it falls off its hinges, slamming the wooden floor with a thunderous kerwhump ! It just misses the toes of his new boots and sends paper money fluttering into the air like chickens trying to take off, or like dead leaves stirred up by a sudden blow, a memory from some forgotten time of trees, of whole forests of them, back before he entered on the desert.

He peels off his white kid gloves to give his hands some air and then, for lack of any larger inspiration, he tucks the cigarillo in the corner of his mouth (he recalls now that the deputy, before leaving him, stuck his own half-smoked butt into his lips like a kind of advance on his wages and then, grinning a crooked grin, snapped a long bony finger at his badge, sending a sharp pain through him like a sudden toothache in the breast) and sets about sweeping the scattered money into a corner with a broom. The building, though hot and airless, has a dank underground smell that spooks him, as does that dead kid hanging there, one shoulder hitched up over his head by the hook, the other hanging limp below his gapping chin, which has been half shot away. It’s so uncomfortable-looking, it makes him feel all pent up, and he regrets that this sheriffing business, which he perceives will take some getting used to, hinders him from just going off on a bust and getting wholesomely tanked and then shooting things up and stomping a lot of people until he can calm down. He recollects something a lawman once told him — or it might have been some outlaw he partnered up with for a time: Lawr’n order, son, he said, is a lot like shittin reglar: mostly makes the day run smoother, but folks need a violent dose a the trots now’n then jest not t’git all stoppered up’n lose their fightin edge.