Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

For at least a minute, Saunders stood speechless, staring openmouthed at the inspector. His face turned a ghostly white, then a bright red, and finally a deep angry purple. “You’re…you’re crazy,” he finally managed to sputter.

Jasper winked and started to move on. “I might be,” he said over his shoulder, “but at least I’m not payin’ money to lick a whore’s dirty feet.”

Even though he had finally turned the tables on Saunders, his most vocal critic and one of the snootiest pricks to ever come out of Ross County, Jasper was still rattled by the encounter. Because it was the only thing that soothed him when he became upset, he hurried home right after work and took his buffalo gun out of the closet in his bedroom, where he kept it wrapped in an old quilt. Sitting down on the bed in front of a tall mirror, he wiped the long, heavy rifle down with a rag dampened with Hoppe’s Solvent. He began talking to himself as he did so, glancing in the mirror from time to time, pretending that someone was seated across from him listening. “So this Jasper feller,” he said to his reflection, “he decided his town had been dirty long enough and it was time to clean it up, and the first thing he did was go over to Sandy Saunders’s office on Paint Street and, BOOM, he shot the dirty snake’s head off with a buffalo gun his daddy bought at an auction one time up in Frankfort, and, by God, you should have seen the look on the sonofabitch’s face right before ol’ Jasper pulled the trigger, and his brains splattered like red mud against the wall. And then he walked over to the jail and killed both those Wallingford boys and their old man just because they’d let everything go to hell, and then he blasted a hole the size of a…” He talked on and on like this for quite a while, assassinating various city leaders and other higher-ups, ridding the town of filth and corruption once and for all. He was being hailed a hero when he realized he was at it again, losing himself in a fantasy that he kept wishing he had the courage to carry out. Though he did so with regret, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a speech being given by some big-breasted matron in which she was extolling his high morals and princely virtues. She was standing on a stage in the newly renamed Cone Park. Draped behind her was a banner that had the image of a buffalo gun sewn on it, and in the front row sat his father, alive and well and hardly aged at all.

After sitting for a few minutes staring at his now silent image in the mirror, he wrapped the gun in the blanket and stuck it back in the closet. Then he dropped his pants, undid his truss. A thin shaft of yellow sunlight swirling with dust motes shone through a crack in the curtains. Taking out his cock, the bane of his existence and his cross to carry for as long as he walked the earth, he wrapped both hands around it and whipped it against the side of the oak dresser until he wept. He finally quit beating it and took a bloody leak in a bucket sitting in the corner and bunched it back up in his pants. Exhausted by his efforts, he went downstairs and drank a glass of water, then curled up on his mother’s couch and went to sleep with all her old plaster saints watching over him with sadness and understanding and compassion, as saints are wont to do.

TWO DAYS AFTER killing the store clerk from Russell, the brothers came to a high granite bluff overlooking a wide river. A mile or so to the west, they could just make out, in the early morning fog, a train crossing over the water on a covered bridge; and to the east, they watched a coal-fired barge come around a curve, pulling a load of raw lumber. They had been riding hard all night. To Chimney’s dismay, most of the arsenal they had collected had to be dumped in a pond after the packhorse split a hoof and couldn’t keep up. A group of men, a dozen or more in number, had been gaining on them steadily. Yesterday evening Cane had caught a whiff of their cook fire as they came up out of a steep, rocky ravine they had hidden in all day. While he pushed forward with a weak and feverish Cob, Chimney had slipped up close to their camp and listened to them as they ate and drunkenly bragged about what they would do with the criminals after they killed them. From what he could gather, a bearded man that the others called Captain was the leader. Sitting on a campstool, he wore an old blue coat with tarnished braids on the shoulders, and a tall hat decorated with shiny bits of foil and a plume of peacock feathers. “As long as we got their heads as proof for the bounty, I don’t give a good goddamn what you do,” he heard him say. “Fuck ’em in the ass for all I care.”

“By God, Cap, that’s a grand idea,” another man said. “Many women as they’ve raped, them sonsofbitches deserve a good cornholing.”

“But do we cut their heads off before we fuck ’em, or after we fuck ’em?” someone else asked.

“Well,” Captain said, as he rooted loose a piece of meat stuck between his teeth with a finger, “the way I see it, if’n you want them to squirm around a bit and not just lay there like some ol’ cold housewife, then ye’d best keep ’em alive until after you’ve had your fill.”

As Chimney listened to several others voice their opinions about the pros and cons of live fucks versus dead ones, he settled a bead on Captain’s head with the Enfield. He wondered how much cornholing they’d be up for if he blew the old boy’s gummy brains all over their hot vittles. His heart started beating faster, and he felt his finger slowly begin to squeeze the trigger, but then he recalled Cane saying, “Whatever you do, don’t start nothing. The shape Cob’s in, we’d never be able to outrun ’em.” Letting out a sigh, he turned away and sneaked back to his horse. It had taken him half the night to find them in the dark.

“So that’s the Ohio?” Chimney asked.

“Far as I can figure, it is,” Cane said.

“Jesus, I never thought it’d be that big.”

“Looks like the bridge is the only way across.”

“Well, let’s get to it then,” Chimney said. “If they didn’t get too drunk last night, those bastards probably ain’t more than an hour or so behind us.”

Cane shook his head. “No, we’ll have to wait till the sun goes down. We get caught in the middle of that thing in the daylight it’d be a goddamn turkey shoot.” He looked around at the thin trees and patchy grass growing out of the rocky soil. “At least here we got the high ground.”

“But there’s nowhere to run if they find us,” Chimney argued. “Unless we do what Bloody Bill did, and I’ll say right now I’d just as soon shoot it out.”

Looking over the edge of the steep bluff, at least two hundred feet above the river, Cane thought about how Bill Bucket, with a small army closing in on him from three sides, had chosen to leap to his death with his horse off a high cliff in some windblown New Mexico desert. “A modern-day Icarus” was the way Charles Winthrop III described him in that last flowery paragraph, “harried and hemmed in on all sides by a cruel and unjust world, making a final glorious attempt to break free of all his earthly bonds.” Though they didn’t have any notion as to who this Icarus feller was, they had speculated he was probably some robber who had come to a bad end in some bygone time. Cane rubbed the back of his neck, glanced over at Cob. “What do ye think, brother? Can ye go a little farther?”

Cob was slumped over in his saddle, a thin string of drool hanging from his bottom lip. His skin was pale and greasy with sweat. When he heard Cane speaking to him, he straightened up a little and opened his dull eyes. “Remember them peaches the old man had hid?” he said.

“What about them?”