Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

As far as the man in the back room went, he’d been beyond caring after the second day in the chains. His name was Johansson, and he was a carpenter from Indiana who specialized in fine joinery and loved to square dance, but after tonight, he would just be a pile of dumb pieces. Around three or four in the morning, Pollard would bag up everything he wasn’t keeping and carry it over to Paint Creek. Standing on the bank shaking out the bloody burlap sacks and watching the slop float away in the dark water, he would picture some of it making it via the Ohio all the way to Cairo, Illinois, and from there down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the soft parts eventually passing through a hundred fish guts, the bones scattered perhaps as far as the cold, deep Atlantic. And for just a few minutes, with the stars ticking in his ears like bombs and the air rubbing against his skin like sandpaper, he would find himself slowly building to an ecstatic orgasm, as if some beautiful angel was reaching down out of the heavens and touching him with a knowing hand in all the right places.

THE POSSE FROM Russell, their horses wrung out and the last of their liquor gone and the storekeeper getting on their nerves with his countless retelling of his brazen confrontation with the outlaws, returned to town two days later, half drunk and empty-handed. No sooner had the bleary and disappointed clerk walked into his house than his wife showed him a new poster issued just that morning stating that Kentucky was upping the reward for the Jewett Gang an additional five hundred dollars. “God Almighty,” he said, “I better go get the boys rounded back up.”

“Now wait a minute, Wilbur,” she said. “Why let any of those fools have a share of it? There’s only the three of them, and you done winged the one, right?” She grabbed his hands and looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Just think about it, the new life all that money could buy.” He stood for a long moment looking past her out the window at his brood of rickety brats playing listlessly around the front stoop. One of them, his namesake no less, was eating dirt again, and he was the healthiest one of the bunch. How would he ever pay Mr. Haskins for his rifle when he couldn’t even keep his own family fed? He remembered again what the sonofabitch had said as he strutted out the door: “That’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about.” His wife was right. To share an opportunity like this when he was in such wretched straits would be downright madness. Townsfolk would talk about him for years, about how he went back out on his own to hunt the bandits down that very same afternoon, barely taking the time to swallow some cold hash and trade in his old plug for a fresh one at Jim Flannery’s livery, talking gibberish about having an important appointment at some crossroads somewhere.

—

IT WASN’T LONG before the Jewetts were on the move again. Hardly believing his luck that he’d found them, the storekeeper had managed to get within a hundred feet of the house before Chimney spied him over the rim of his coffee cup through the porch vines. Now he lay sprawled in the mass of rosebushes around the well, his spectacles still cocked crooked on his face, a.303 bullet from the Lee-Enfield having split his brave but foolish heart into two nearly equal pieces of pulpy muscle. He had toppled into the briars just as a light rain began to fall. Cane and Chimney then circled the perimeter of the property searching for other members of the posse, but all they found was a lone horse covered with sores tied to a tree fifty yards into the woods. The animal had been on its way to the glue factory when the clerk rushed into Flannery’s yelling that he needed a new mount. “Not worth keeping,” Chimney said, looking the spindly nag over. He pulled off the saddle and bridle and cut it loose. Then they headed back to where the dead man lay. Inside one of his pockets, along with a handful of shells and two dirty hoecakes, they found the updated wanted poster.

Cane kept glancing up to scan the tree line as he read the latest offer. They were now accused of three times as many murders as they had actually committed, and robbing twice as many banks. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the torching of an old folks’ home in Gainesville, Florida, and the vicious defilement of two virgin sisters with a wooden crucifix outside of Waynesboro, Virginia, had also been added to their list of crimes. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. The rain picked up a little more. “I’d say we better get out of here tonight,” he said. “If some damn store clerk can find us, it’s hard to tell what’s comin’ next.” Passing Chimney one of the corn cakes, he started to bite into the other one before he realized what he was doing. He slung it to the ground and stepped on it; and for a brief second he was recalling the time that Pearl stomped Chimney’s biscuit on the floor, not long before he passed.

“But what about Cob?”

“Don’t have no choice,” Cane said. “We’ll just have to take it slow.”

Chimney stuffed the corn cake into his mouth and bent down to pry the Winchester from the clerk’s hands. “I think I’ll hang on to this.”

“Jesus Christ, brother, we already got enough guns to start a goddamn army.”

“We might need to before this is over.”

“Well, I hope that poor bastard took better care of it than he did his horse,” Cane said.

“I doubt it,” Chimney said. “You’d have to be an idiot to try what he did.”

“Aw, you can’t blame him,” Cane said, just as a loud clap of thunder shook the air and the rain turned into a steady downpour. “Fifty-five hundred dollars, that much money would fuck any man’s head up.”

Thirty minutes later, as they started away from the farmhouse in the gray storm light, Cob looked down with feverish eyes from his horse at the storekeeper’s wet corpse caught in the briars, his face turned up at the sky, and his open mouth overflowing with rainwater like some obscene fountain. “It’s funny,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Cane asked.

“I was just a-thinkin’ that one of the very last things I said to that man ’fore he shot me was I hoped we got some rain. And now look at him.”

FROM TIME TO time during that period, Jasper saw a couple of the men who sat on the city council stop by the Whore Barn, men who were always casting complaints about him shutting down this or that well or shithouse like he was some sort of despot lording it over the citizenry, when all he was trying to do was the job he’d been assigned. He had met up with the worst one of them just yesterday, Sandy Saunders. Dressed in a tailored blue serge suit and swinging a new cane, the insurance salesman started to pass by silently, with a look of disdain bordering on revulsion, as if the sanitation inspector were nothing but a maggot or a bit of offal stuck to the bottom of one of his custom-made shoes. However, when Jasper stopped in the middle of the sidewalk three or four feet in front of him and grinned, Saunders couldn’t resist a smart remark. “What say, shit scooper?” He tapped his cane on the sidewalk, then struck a rakish pose as he saw a couple of young ladies approaching.

“I wouldn’t call me that no more if I was you,” Jasper replied, the smile plastered on his face growing even wider.

“Oh,” Saunders said with a laugh, “and why not, you little turd?”

Moving closer, Jasper waited until the women walked on by, then said, “Because I saw you over at the Whore Barn the other night. Sucking on the toes of the fat one got the grease dabbed all over her face. And you a-courtin’ that nice daughter of Mr. Chapman’s and blowin’ off to everyone about how you’re gonna run for mayor next fall. That’s why, Sandy. From now on, you either start calling me Mr. Cone, or I’ll tell the whole goddamn town about ye.”