John Hawkes - The Beetle Leg

The wagon was burning brightly. Red light danced on the wheel tops, curled from beneath it and flitted up and down the steps which appeared to be driven into the serrated earth. The onlookers, Wade at the head of them, watched, spoke in gentler tones before the untied horse and leprous, flaking chimney.

“He’s got a girl with him,” one accused from behind. They stirred uncomfortably, huddled at the caving rear of the jail.

“If he has, he’ll make known of it. But none’s been brought this way as yet.”

Wade shook his head, in a whisper promised, “Better than that. He’s a man with knives. Wait and see.”

They could hear the muffled windy sound of a choked voice, the righteous tune of one who continued to talk even when closeted with the Missouri madman. “Old Sheriff ain’t going to be stabbed,” grinned Wade from side to side. More soft now came the Sheriff’s muddled sermon through drifting leaves, as something, a dream, slowly stopped his mouth.

“You, Wade, you been in there?”

“Ain’t anybody going to put Wade in that wagon, are they, Wade? Maybe he couldn’t take care of himself like the Sheriff.”

The horse sniffed the milling of the men. The head waved, hard of sight, feeling in the darkness for the hand with a rope. He was roman nosed, carried at the tip of his skull a broad sloping pad of fuzz and moleskin that had been cuffed when he refused to ford a river or rise in the morning to the traces. He was one that would stand when gimp-legged farmers came out to ask for help. The slack pockets in the nose closed in winter; in summer he snorted, the long ears lay flat. The tail switched, swept between the shaggy legs, rolled briskly into the black pear rump of an animal a fraction blooded with the mule. He turned his head away. From the desert other signs — a missing sheep, a carcass — now awakened the linings of his nerves. One foot moved, returned.

“When’s the show come on? When’s this fellow going to bring out that girl?”

“Or a two head calf.”

“Or a baby in a mason jar.”

The door opened an inch, a crack of fire, and was sloughed shut again by a helping shoulder. It opened, swung to, was pushed like a shutter from the nest of flames, and Cap Leech, careful not to smash his hands, stepping backwards, lifted the drowsy Sheriff into sight. They stood on the narrow platform of the top step from which Cap Leech, who now held the Sheriff’s faintly reeling body with one thin straight arm, had squinted at an early and voiceless dawn, scratching his face. With the other hand he picked at the lawkeeper’s hidden shirt front and the tip of a long white sheet was tossed back into the fire.

The Sheriff continued to swing his head, mumbled through misfit jaws, “The Range and Prairie Almanac never lies, the Moon don’t stand still. You bide by what I tell you.” Leech propped the Sheriff, took quick small steps to make of himself a ramrod. “If you don’t listen,” said the Sheriff, “I’ll fall.” Odors of disinfecting floor wash and spirits of ammonia drifted from the red door.

“Boys,” Wade tried to free his arms, “they’re dancing!”

Leech had heard enough about the almighty moon, pituitary of the wheat field and cow in foal; down one step he went and, catching the Sheriff around his waist, set him on the ground. He was light, round with talking gas. Cap Leech pushed back the head and folded the numb fingers in the pinched cup of the lap. He turned and for a few moments walked a circle some way apart, hands in long pockets, pausing now and then to stare for twenty miles through the darkness where rose one discolored furrow, a rib of earth that wormed for half an inch above the rest, as if it had been plowed up and left to dry, a spot on the horizon, the dam. Out there not a living creature, no wrist to count or old flank needing salve — he had lain his touch on animals also, in a stockyard razed by fire, had peeled the white fat glue from under bellies or driven his knife through an open eye to the brain — and he returned to the doped figure of the Sheriff. He rocked back and forth on his heels.

The Sheriff looked up, tenderly felt his temples, tried to speak, and stomach doubling in noiseless spasms at the same time, swayed as if someone boxed the sides of his head. “Quackery,” he said, awakening, “quackery,” and searched for the bars of the jail. His mouth was full of aspirin and the taste of steel.

Cap Leech unpocketed one slender hand, drew out the squeaking tongs carried in his trousers like a small key, and pushed the Sheriff down again to the step. He aimed and held the fat man with the ball point of the instrument, gently tapped the softened breastbone. The Sheriff wriggled at the end of it, ogled upward with drugged eyes.

“Now,” said Cap Leech, “I’ll talk.”

“Wade there will clear my head.”

“What you been doing to the Sheriff?”

As the law officer tried his legs and wobbled in the dark fernless yard behind the jail and Wade bounced after him, Cap Leech climbed to the top of the splintered steps, sat quietly and watched them. His mouth cracked a line to see the Sheriff sternly sway, nearly topple, an aged guinea hen with shattered cerebellum and aimless walk.

“What did you do with his revolver?”

Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin. He picked the back of his hand blotched with the corrosive action of cheap chemicals. He watched the Sheriff feel himself with wet fingers while the moon-faced friend, calling in a hurt voice now and then, attempted to learn what he had tampered with. It was a warm night and Cap Leech had cut again as he wished into a foreign town, a soft head. Sight of the Sheriff still on his feet gave him as much pleasure as those whom long before he had left helpless on a bed of white.

Wade and the Sheriff rolled from the shadow on stiff, rubber tires, a topheavy tin pickup truck. They swung it silently in a half circle on the edge of the light from the nearby wagon, stepped back and admired it. The Sheriff, suddenly stooped to spit forth a long dark string, motioned Wade to attend the truck and tottering, amazed at the slime, felt a bird body hot from his intestines lodge in his throat.

A bunched comforter covered the front of the truck — the frail engine, the flapping fenders, the hole of the radiator — and dragged on the ground. Wade tore it off, a matador sweep of dirty cotton. He began to crank but the narrow engine, so worn and without gaskets, still made no sound, turned over with no resistance, loosely. It was a truck that carried both man and animal, rear floorboards chopped from the toes of pigs, a truck to be seen at night with a woman’s knees down to the running boards and in winter left frozen in a field.

Cap Leech’s horse poked his overhanging nose toward the truck, sucked his tail tighter and returned to gazing at the plains. Cap Leech whistled softly through his teeth to see if it would start.

There was a cow in the back of the truck. The sheer and luminous udder swayed lightly through the slatted planks and, as Wade cranked, the red calf gently bounced, tossing the velvet ball. It was a youthful cream head of cheese, a nodding pendant, and the teats protruded only faintly, the knobs of new horns. The Sheriff walked slowly to the side of the truck, reached through and stroked it. The little hoof stamped, the immature red color, pink and brown, quivered in his hand. A smell of new milk and oil, manure, and brake drum fluid filled the yard. Between the red wagon and the truck and backed against the last adobe wall of the jail lay the fresh row of motorcycles, already entwined with corn stalks, webs of dust. Flies and sac-tailed insects moved in columns across the broken spokes. An accumulated late night buzzing came from the heap of confiscated machines, a warm and smoldering pile of metallic fodder.