Smonk

rail, so close to Walton the northerner could smell gun oil.

Toss ye iron in here, he said. Keep ye hands where I can see em.

Walton complied, blanching at the horrific fellow’s goiter and grizzled brown skin and its pockmarks, gashes, scars, and moles. He wore dark lenses with an eyepatch under one and a bush of wild red hair in a braid hanging over his heart and a sprawling beard that made his head larger. His teeth were red and the rattle of his breath like a dog’s low growl. Perhaps here was a “moonshiner,” Walton thought. Which might account for his pensiveness.

What the hell you supposed to be in them outfits? the odd fellow said. A fucking Mountie? Canader’s a few miles north ways, ain’t it, I? He laughed and coughed.

I’d prefer less graphic language, Walton said, gazing into the rifle barrels. He raised his hands, showing no threat. I, sir, am Captain Phail Walton and those men behind me are my Christian Deputies.

Christian? The man coughed and sprayed Walton’s face with blood. Deputies?

The leader moved to reach for a handkerchief in order to blot the blood from his face when the stranger bopped him on the head with the rifle barrels, dislodging his hat. I told ye don’t move, sissy.

Ouch, Walton said, suddenly dizzy.

The fellow had began to chuckle and the wagon creaked with his mirth. Ye looks like a bunch of goggle-eye dandy boys, he said. In them faintsy getups.

We don’t appreciate that kind of insinuation, Walton said.

Shit, said the one-eyed man. The driver whipped his mules and the operation clattered off, the eerie man in the back laughing or coughing, it was hard to tell which.

Walton began walking backward toward the others, wondering what ilk of black magic he’d stumbled upon. Was the peculiar man in the receding wagon’s bed some “haint” of the backwoods? What monsters still roamed these southern wildernesses? Why, here might be Darwin’s “Missing Link” or a specimen of the fabled “Big Foot” of western climes. Walton put his hands on his hips and watched.

The wagon was nearly out of sight.

Meanwhile, loyal Donny wandered up on his own and nibbled Walton’s ear as the old man’s laughter or coughing hackled over the fields. Walton closed his eyes and summoned what wherewithal he had left and pulled the clammy sack of his body into the saddle without opening his eyes. He let Donny walk himself toward the others and thought about Ambrose. How he’d found the Negro face-down, beaten nearly to death, in a Memphis alley. Rats tearing at his pants leg. Walton recalled frightening off the large rodents and helping the wheezing wretch to his feet, procuring him a bowl of turtle soup and rice and giving his testimony while eating with him and several other hungry denizens of the underclass, the Philadelphian thrilled by his own display of open-minded philanthropy.

And now here rode that same philanthropist with quite a different mind, shivering on his horse, backed down, again, ready in fact to give his own man up. He remembered Ambrose “watching his back” on the riverboat and deflecting the murderous intent to Red Man. Later siding with Walton about the burials. How he’d said “bunker” with such faithfulness.

Perhaps it was time, wasn’t it, for Walton to face the fact: Ambrose was right. He, Walton, was indeed an F-U-L, fool. Wasn’t he out here in the wilderness only because he’d backed out of a duel at a Halloween costume party at an Admiral’s summer home in Boston? With Mother on his arm, he’d gone as a “gunslinger,” red shirt and khaki pants with their extra pockets full of “loot,” the polished riding boots, ascot and hat. For fun he’d worn a real gun, unloaded of course. After a misunderstanding, a meaty, red-faced Italian “thug” pulled Walton’s leather gloves from his gunbelt and slapped him across the cheek several times despite Walton proclaiming his innocence in the matter of the Italian’s wife. Yet the Italian, dressed as a giant rabbit, shoved Walton into the seaman’s rosebushes. He then kicked him in the crotch and spat upon him and threw drinks in his face. He hit Walton in the back of the head with his, Walton’s, own pistol.

Walton’s cheeks burned at the memory. Hadn’t he, bleeding from rose thorns, knelt and begged his beefy opponent not to murder him? The man flipping off his rabbit hood now, blood speckled on his faux fur. Hadn’t the Italian agreed to let him go only if Walton removed his pants, crimson shirt and underwear and crawled naked from the party? The mob of them (including a “loose” woman) following in their buggy—not part of the agreement— costumed in masks and gaudy outfits and top hats, swinging lanterns and spewing him with bottles of champagne. Banging cans and firing pistols at the stars. Later, the first strains of morning light had caught him sneaking through a back alley; a Boston police captain on his way to the station-house nabbed him as he tried to sneak into Mother’s hotel. Wrapped in a dirty shirt, Walton was thrown in jail. His head shoved in the chamber pot by the degenerates in his cell. Lice in his hair. Instances of painful sodomy. Mother, her carriage-driver holding her arm, her handkerchief over her mouth and nose, fetched him out of the jailhouse. She’d brought him a scarlet hood and would only suffer his company if he wore it. His darling betrothed Miss Annie’s younger brother had returned Walton’s grandmother’s diamond ring along with a letter he’d only read once but could recite from memory: Dear Phail, please tell me which Parties you plan on attending in the Future so I will not. Never speak to me again. You should spell yr. Name with a “f.” I wish you were dead. Or I was. Somebody. I hate you.—Sincerely, A.

Hadn’t Walton traveled “coach” on the railways south to this wasteland of dry sugarcane and human detritus in the very costume of his shame and with the sole intention of getting himself murdered? Would that not show them all? Did you hear? Phail’s dead! Killed in battle in a southern wilderness. He was no coward after all. We were so wrong about him. They’re going to publish his logbook. A perfect plan: South then dead. Yet somehow he’d discovered a niche for himself. His leadership had given these shiftless men shift. He added focus to their lives. He was their salvation. And might they not be his?

He gazed across the fields of brown to where faithful Loon and Onan waited, glancing at the trees around them. Thus far Walton had squandered chance upon chance for the glory of death in battle, “kill or be killed,” to even his score on God’s night sky of a chalkboard. Red Man should have been Walton’s kill, not Ambrose’s. Hadn’t that rightly been Walton’s mutiny to quell? And those deserters ought to have died impaled by Walton’s sword, not killed by Ambrose’s Winchester. And only moments ago, this wretched man-thing with his enormous rifle and rebellious Negro! They were obviously criminals. Yet was the man-thing dead? Was the Negro?

Was Walton? Had he fought like a man or surrendered his sidearm without a thought? The Christian Deputy leader straightened in his saddle. Strength had returned full force to his knees and he rose in the stirrups and clasped his pommel and nodded as he rode up alongside his men.

Deputy Loon, he said. Deputy Onan. He smiled grimly. Let’s go get that son-of-a-bitch.

Neither man moved.

I see, their leader said. He lowered his gaze. So I’ve lost my authority completely. Not that I blame you—

Naw, Onan said from the side of his mouth. It ain’t that. He and Loon were casting their eyes fearfully at the trees. We jest don’t want that nigger’s friend in the woods to shoot us.

Ned’s face in her dreams but gone when she opened her eyes. She lay in warm hay, it moved with her breath. She was glad there wasn’t any shit in the stall now but there had been some here before. Her face was away from them but she knew that of the three women behind her two were having her time of the month and one was past prime. She tried to sit up but her hands were bound behind her. She rolled over.

They wore black dresses and veils. She didn’t know who the two in back were but the one in front was Mrs. Tate, she could tell from her smell of her dead husband. She blinked and blew hay from her face and rolled over. They’d put her in a barn stall made secure with bars like a jail cell. Hay for sleeping. Slop jar in the corner. Nothing else.

Mrs. Tate held the Mississippi Gambler in her hand. What did you plan to do with this? Cut my throat?

Yall poisoned me, she said.

The ladies said nothing.

Mrs. Tate, Evavangeline said. Did I answer ye questions wrong and this is what I get?

I’m sorry, said the little woman. She handed the knife away. But you can’t say names here. We don’t have names here. You’ve been bitten by a struck dog. I saw the marks on your arm while you bathed. These other ladies have witnessed them as well. So we have no choice but to confine you. For your own safety. See if the ray bees have got you.

No, she said. She wriggled up against the wall and fell forward, her ankles bound as well. I ain’t got none, I swar. That dog was my own pet dog. It never had no ray bees.

If you don’t exhibit any symptoms, we’ll set you free and you can be a citizen of our town. And if you do have