Keep these instruments safe, fellow. Maybe I’ll tip ye a penny for looking after em good.
I wouldn’t accept no tip penny from you, Mister Smonk, if it was the last penny minted in this land.
Smonk had coughed. Do what.
I said if it was to happen a copper blight over this whole county and a penny was selling for a dollar and a half and I hadn’t eat a bite of food in a month and my boy was starving, I wouldn’t take no penny from you. Not even if ye paid me a whole nother penny to take it.
But Smonk had turned away.
Angry harmonica notes preceded him as he twisted his shoulders to fit the door and stepped into the hot, smoky diningroom, cigar ash dusted down his tie like beard dander. The eating tables had been shoved against the walls and stacked surface to surface, the legs of the ones on top in the air like dead livestock. Justice of the Peace Elmer Tate and the lawyer and the banker and two or three farmers and the liveryman and that doctor from before checking his watch and Hobbs the undertaker, all deacons, looked at him. The talking had hushed, the men quiet as chairs. The nine ball flashing its number across the billiard table in the corner didn’t make its hole and ticked off the seven and stopped dead on the felt.
Smonk leaned against the wall, it gave a little. He coughed into his handkerchief and dabbed his lips and stuffed the cloth into his pocket, the conversation and game of billiards picking back up.
For a moment nothing happened except the quip of a mockingbird from outside and Smonk unstoppering his gourd. Then the door opened at the opposite end of the room and into the light walked the circuit judge, a Democrat, Mason and former army officer equally renowned for his drinking and his muttonchops. He acknowledged no other man as he excused his way through them and stepped onto the wooden dais erected for this occasion and seated himself behind the table set up for him, a glass of water there and a notepad, quill and ink bottle. He wore a black suit and hat like a preacher and for a gavel used the butt end of a new Smith & Wesson Schofield .45.
Order now, order, he called, removing his hat. Be seated, gentlemen. He screwed his monocle in.
Ever body set down, called the bailiff. And git ye got-dern cover off.
The men snatched off their hats and scuffed into chairs. In the rear of the room, Smonk kept standing. He ashed his cigar. For once he wished he wore a hat so he could leave it on. A sombrero, say.
Let’s see. The judge cleared his throat. First on the docket here is the people of Old Texas Alabama versus Eugene Oregon Smonk.
Not first, the defendant growled. The whole docket. Today I’m yer whole fucking docket.
Anger charged the diningroom: the state flag in the corner seemed to quiver though the air between the men was as still as the inside of a rock. From somewhere out beyond the dusty desiccated sugarcane came the high parched yap of a mad-dog.
Afternoon, gentlemen. Smonk grinned. Judge.
He pulled his shoulders off the wall and hung his cane on his arm and puffed his cigar and stopped up his gourd. But he’d only made two steps toward his table when he paused and raised his head.
Something was different.
Somehow, the red-headed farmer glaring at him was not the same farmer Smonk had beaten with a coiled whip. The town clerk was not the same town clerk he had slapped down in the street, whose face he’d ground in the mud and money purse taken. Somehow that one there wasn’t the banker he’d swindled out of seventy-five acres of bottomland including a creek. That one was not the liveryman whose daughter he’d won at rook and taken in the feed room in the back. Hobbs the undertaker was another undertaker entirely and Tate yonder wasn’t the same spineless justice of the peace Smonk had been blackmailing near a year. They were all other faces, all other men.
He didn’t know them. He didn’t know them.
The bailiff wasn’t a bailiff now but another man altogether. They were scuffling to their feet in a mob as the judge banged his pistol so hard the ink bottle jumped off.
Order! he called. God damn it, I said order!
But there was no order left.
Instead there were fire pokers and riding crops. An ash shovel. There were bricks and unlooped belts and letter openers and knots of kindling. An iron pump handle. A broken window’s flashing knives. One soaked noose, cue sticks, table legs with nails crooked as fangs, the picks and pikes of splintered chairs.
The men advanced on Smonk with leery sidesteps. He ducked the hurled eight ball which smashed a window. He dropped his cigar to the floor and didn’t bother to toe it out and it lay smoking between his boots. He took off his glasses and folded them away into his breast pocket, in no hurry despite the men closing in behind their weapons, so close the ones in front could see his red teeth.
Get him, said somebody in the corner.
But Smonk raised the prongs of his fingers and his assailants froze. He leaned back, haled a long tug of air and held it, as if he might say some truth they needed to hear.
They waited for him to speak.
Instead he coughed, blood smattering those faces closest. And in the same moment each fellow in the room tall enough to see witnessed Eugene Oregon Smonk’s eye uncork from his head into the air.
For an instant it glinted in a ray of light through the window, then McKissick the bailiff caught it like a marble.
He opened his palm and grinned.
When he looked up Smonk had a derringer in one hand and sword in the other and he was backing toward the sideboard where all those lined-up rifles and pistols lay gleaming.
Well have at it, he yelled, you hongry bitches.
Meanwhile, the sun had shied behind a cloud. The horses along the rail outside were bland and peaceful, many with their eyes shut. Even the flies had landed. Across the street, the two photographers stood on either side of their wagon cracking their knuckles and glancing up the deserted street and down it.
The blond boy had tied his balloon in the raw hole in the mule’s ear and was climbing into the saddle. He wiggled his behind. The stirrups, adjusted for Smonk, hung too far down so he didn’t use them, even as the mule backed up on its own and faced east.
When the first shot came from inside, the photographers let fall their tripod and leapt into the wagon and flung away a green tarp to reveal a 1908 Model Hiram Maxim water-cooled machine gun bolted to its metal jackstand. One man checked the lock while the other twirled vises and tightened the petcock valve.
I heard he killed his own momma, he said.
For starters, said the other.
The blond boy slapped the mule across its withers and gigged it with his bare heels. Let’s git to that orphanage, he said, saluting the machine gunners as they waited, one slowly returning the salute. The mule began to walk, and then trot, the bailiff’s son not looking back despite the storm of gunfire, the balloon bobbing above them like a thought the mule was having, empty of history.
2 THE TOMBIGBEE
TWO WEEKS EARLIER, IN THE STATE OF LOUISIANA, THERE HAPPENED a scrawny fifteen year old girl burnt brown by the sun and whoring town to town unaware there were other options for a girl. Evavangeline was her name, the only one she knew. There was about ninety pounds’ worth of her, and say five feet, plain, petite and slightly buck-toothed. She had jags of red hair cut short by her own hand because it was cooler that way and she bore a large red scar on the side of her neck. More often than not she’d be mistaken for a boy and recently had been chased out of Shreveport for sodomy and romanticisms with a member of “his” own gender.
A group of well-uniformed Christian Deputies had burst in upon the hot upstairs hotel room where the two were transacting their business in the fashion of dogs, and Evavangeline had sprung from the bed as if ejaculated. She’d crashed unpaid out the window, clutching an armload of men’s clothing before her privates.
The deputies fell upon her co-fornicator and dragged him naked and hollering down rough pine steps and through the muddy street and strung him up by his wrists and administered him a whipping. He bellowed at each
