Robert Coover - Ghost Town

While he’s meditating on the shit side of the law and how it might play out in his new career, the barroom chanteuse with the orange curls and ruby-studded cheek comes in with four or five men masked in neckerchiefs and walks up to his grille at the counter.

Though she looks like she’s probably up to no good, he tells her howdy in a sociable way and asks her if she wants to make a deposit.

No, but I’d be mighty grateful ifn yu would, sheriff, she says back with a wink, digging at herself between her legs with her left hand while pointing a pistol at him with her right. Actually, darlin, it’s a holdup.

Well, he sighs, I should oughter arrest yu all, but they aint nuthin wuth stealin. The gold nuggets is already gone.

I know, sheriff, we stole them some while back. Whut we come fer t’day is thet silver badge yu’re sportin.

No, caint let yu have thet.

Now yu aint sayin yu wanta die fer thet dang tin star!

Nope. But I aint givin it up neither.

Now aint thet feller fulla beans!

Lissen at him blowin smoke!

I think I reckanize the sumbitch, Belle, says one of her fellow desperadoes, a one-eyed graybeard with a lumpy nose, best he can tell behind the bandanna. Thet thar’s the dude whut done in Big Daddy.

Yu dont say!

Hell, lets jest whup his weedy butt and take thet star, Belle!

Yeah, and all them fancy duds t’boot!

I could strictly use me a blade like thet!

Now jest git a grip on yer dicks, boys! Dont wanta mess with the sheriff when he’s all hotted up like this. Yu seen whut he kin do when his dander’s up. The chanteuse hitches one breast as though repocketing it in its cup and gives his golden buckskin breeches a slow affectionate study, then peers up at him and winks dreamily, scratching her crotch with her pistol barrel. Best we rob sumthin else.

Aw shit, aint all thet much here, Belle, whines a runty pop-eyed bandit with ears tattooed like spiderwebs. Most everthin’s tuck whut’s wuth takin.

Well, says the chanteuse languidly, and the pistol goes off between her thighs, sending a bullet ricocheting around the hollow bank lobby like a hornet on a tear — he ducks as it whines past, and it caroms hollowly off the steel doorframe of the vault, then exits through a window, where, outside in the noonday sun, a yelp is heard, though whether animal or human, hard to tell. When he raises his head, his own six-shooters drawn, he notices there’s a hole in the chanteuse’s skirts he can see clean through like a peephole into nothing, and there are only two or three men in here now where before there were more. She licks her smoking gun barrel suggestively, and says: They’s thet boy hangin thar. I reckon we could steal him. Thet awright, sheriff honey?

The boy? He’s kinder sorta dead.

I know. Little peckerwood warnt wuth cowpie when he wuz kickin, but in his present condition he’s got some doobobs we can sell. Or eat.

How about it, sheriff? demands a masked fat man wearing batwing chaps and a soft tattered vest, split from armpit to hem. We gotta shoot it out or whut?

He stares through the grille at the chanteuse and her disreputable gang, weary of this exchange and wondering if maybe he ought to take up some other trade altogether, like prospecting or cattle rustling. Or maybe just throw in with the chanteuse and her warm powdered bosom; who’s he to right wrongs and punish evil? His gaze is drawn into the hole in her skirts as toward a far hazed horizon which he knows to be both a promise and the absence of all promise, and so a terrible and fatal lure, and it brings to mind something else that steely-eyed sheep rancher said, or maybe it was the dying cowboy: They aint nuthin wuth dyin fer out here, pard, he said, cept choosin yer own dyin, and dyin fer it aint choosin it neither. Inbetwixt times, yu jest keep on adventurin on accounta the generalized human restlessness and cuz the end of whutall else is emptiness and the end of adventurin is emptiness too. He pulls his attention up out of the hole and out of his doleful cogitations, which have taken a spell, though no one seems to mind. Well the boy aint like proppity, he sighs, this decision having come to him, somewhat like the town did, rather than he to it. He holsters his pistols, flicks the butt away. Do whut yu damn please. And, taking up his rifle, he leaves the thieves to their drear pickings and steps out into the sudden desert night.

The first thing he sees as his eyes adjust to the moonless dark is the hanged man twisting melancholically on his rope. His fancy eastern duds are gone, probably stolen; he’s naked except for weathered cowhide chaps, old busted-up boots, and a round felt hat, which cozies his head down to his nose. He looks like he’s chewing a dead cigar with his ghostly butt and drooling tobacco juice from it; probably a roll of paper money shoved up there and set alight in respect of some juridical tradition from these parts; his mouth’s stuffed with it too, in and around the erected tongue. The creaking of the gallows rope, a distant howl, and his own footsteps in the grit of the empty street are the only sounds to be heard.

In the dim starlight, that grit glows pallidly all the way to the encircling horizon, the town’s shabby structures negatively silhouetted against it, or else blackly lost in the black sky, discernible only where they blot out the stars. The hanging banker’s his lone companion out here: all’s shut down, even the bank, back there somewhere in the night behind him. The saloon, too, of course, no use looking in there, he knows what he’d find. He should have asked his deputy where the jail was; he could have spent the night in it. Assuming the night’s his for spending in a place like this.

He sorely misses his mustang now. Though it was its locomotory aspect that he most valued on the way here, now it’s his thoughts that are most afflicted by the horse’s absence. Astride it, he always seemed to know where he wanted to go, what he was meant to do. It even, oddly, made him feel rooted somehow, and thus somebody, somebody with a name, even as they drifted, he and the horse, uncompassed yet resolute, across this boundless desolation. The creature was a living part of him, which fit him as if born with him like his hat and boots, but it shared his miseries, too, his pains and hungers, absorbing some of them as rags might stanch a wound. And he’d got used to the view. Down here on the ground, he feels somewhat blinkered, things risen up around him that used to be mapped out below at some safer remove.

Not that he was gentle toward that evil-eyed bandy-shanked old cayuse, as he referred to it in his more sentimental humors. He respected it and shared what little he had with it, but it possessed a wayward mind of its own, and when it got too refractory, he had to take the whip to it or dig his spurs bone-deep into its flanks and haul on the bit till its mouth frothed and bled. Couldn’t let the dumb beast beat him.

Though in the end it did. They’d been out under that scorching sun for what seemed like years when they struck upon a fresh watering hole: just seemed to pop up out of nowhere. The rim of it was littered with the bleached bones of men and horses and he supposed it might be poisoned so he let the horse drink first to see what would happen. Nothing did, so he joined the horse at the edge, drinking with his face in the water and then from his hat. The water was clean and sweet and so cold it made his teeth ache. He soaked himself, filled his canteen, and got ready to move on, but the horse had contrary notions and wouldn’t budge from the spot. This was stupid, there was nothing to eat, no protection from the blistering sun, and anyway it made no larger sense, but the cantankerous thing seemed ready just to give it all up and toss in there with all those other anonymous bones. He talked to it, cajoled it, cursed it, kicked it, tried to lead it away on foot, yanked on its ears and bridle, used the horsewhip on it, his rifle stock, but the useless old scrag would not move; it was as still and stubborn as stone. Then, after he’d been whipping it mercilessly until his arms were ready to drop, he saw that what he was beating was stone and the damned horse was over on the other side of the hole, head down, still serenely lapping up water. He was furious. He whistled sharply at the perverse beast and it stepped toward him, into the water, and disappeared. In panic, he dove in after it, but the hole was only a foot deep and he hit the bottom hard. The water was warmer now and tasted salty and stung his eyes. When he could see again, he saw that the horse was standing in the same place where he’d been beating it before and the stone was gone. So he shot it. Enough was enough. On its side, the wounded animal kept quivering and kicking at the air and it had a pitiful expression on its face, so he put the rifle to its ear and finished it off. That was when, looking up from what he’d done, he first spied this town shimmering out on the horizon. He left the saddle and trappings behind on the dead horse, figuring to come back for them later, and set off walking across the desert toward the town, exhausted from his mad struggle, his legs heavy as sandbags, half dozing even as he stumbled along, regretting what he’d done of course, man always hates to lose his horse — and then one black moonless night, a night not unlike this one, there he was, slumped in the saddle, with the mustang plodding along under him like always, a dreadful thirst upon him like he’d been sucking salt, and his canteen empty.