Let’s ride, men, Walton repeated.
He’ll shoot us, Loon answered, watching the trees.
Good heavens! I told you, there’s no gunman in the woods, Walton insisted. I’m afraid we’ve been “bluffed.” We’ve been shown leniency as well, I should imagine. That feral-looking “cuss” might have shot us all.
Bluffed? Onan said. By that old nigger in his wagon?
Negro. Yes. And didn’t, just moments ago, Ambrose take his leave as well? Was he shot? No.
The deputies looked at one another.
Who? Loon asked.
Walton stared at one then the other. Ambrose? Our former second-in-command?
That stumpy nigger, ye mean?
Hell, I didn’t know he ranked me, Onan told Loon. I’d of been done killed him if I’d knew that.
Yeah, added Loon. We ain’t got to kill nobody.
Could we continue this discussion, Walton said, in transit? He swept back his hand to indicate the road.
What about that feller in the woods?
Walton clenched his fists. For the last time, there is no “feller” in the woods! It’s absurd to think that pointing would occasion murder. Look. He jabbed a finger at Onan, who yelled and covered his face with his hands.
Nothing happened.
See?
Onan lowered his hands. Then a shot cracked and the deputy flew backward out of his saddle.
Meanwhile, the children from the orphanage lay flat on their bellies with their hands over their ears, as William R. McKissick Junior had told them to, before he left. No matter what they heard, he’d said. He’d said witch ladies were about. If they saw a witch lady to run as far as they could and when they were far enough he told them to lay on the ground flat as a flapjack and quiet as a dead mouse. The children had seen two witch ladies dressed in black earlier and run a mile away and been lying in the sugarcane for the hours since. They’d never once spoken and barely moved and slept in fits, one little girl starting awake when her hand slipped from her ear and she half-heard a distant voice calling,
11 THE TOWN
THE BAILIFF, MCKISSICK, RAISED HIS ELBOW TO WARD OFF THE blacksmith’s next blow and heard his wrist snap. He called out his own name and said that they had Smonk on the run, he was theirs for the taking, but Gates seemed intent on murder. He raised the stock again and brought it down and McKissick’s world darkened at its edges and the room began to peel away and he was sinking in a warm, pleasant sea.
Gates stood panting. The rifle slick with blood. His face red with it. He staggered back against the log walls, his hands shaking. He couldn’t get his breath, he thought he might vomit. McKissick lay still in his own blood. Dead? Gates watched a gorgeous blue knot unwhorl from the bailiff’s temple as if his brains were about to rupture. Alive yet, or how might a knot rise? The blacksmith clenched his fists to still his hands and stepped past the dead whore and searched among the wreckage of the cabin until he found a huge butcher knife stuck in a wall and fell across his former partner. McKissick was naked and wearing his, Gates’s, shoes. He touched the blade to the bailiff’s chest where he imagined the heart to be and raised his other hand, palm flat. He closed his eyes.
He opened them.
McKissick had him by the balls. Gates forgot the knife and tried to twist away but the bailiff only squeezed harder. Somehow McKissick had gained the knife and swiped Gates across the chest and the gush of blood was such that the bailiff nearly choked on it before he could scrabble away and watch the man twitch and gurgle.
He tried to pull himself up and overturned a table. He couldn’t focus his eyes. He sat against the wall, trying to catch his breath. The room seemed bright. Then it seemed very bright.
Meanwhile, from the hill at the edge of the east woods, Ike gazed at the irregular houses and buildings and oak trees of Old Texas. He’d done this slow circuit dozens of times before, the town globed in his spyglass as he scanned the angles and doors of each building and outbuilding. A ladder that wasn’t there yesterday. The alterations of firewood piles and how long it took a splotch of birdshit to fade from a windowsill. There were ten widows in the town, ages he’d calculated from forty to eighty-five, and half a dozen young women and girls. He knew who lived where. Who’d had which husband.
Ike squatted and studied the ruin of the hotel. Looked like nothing saved, a total loss. He smiled grimly— Smonk always had been thorough—and focused the telescope when he saw a widow go in the livery barn’s side door and, a moment later, the girl he’d seen go in three hours ago come out.
Shift change. What were they guarding?
Near dusk, from beside a tall oak in the southeast, he spied a wildcat crawling on its belly toward the well. It raised to its hind legs to drink but at the sight of the water it convulsed and ran down into the town snapping its teeth. A widow hurried out and shot it with a snake charmer four-ten. She returned a moment later carrying a pitchfork with which she speared the cat and lugged it out of his sight. Ike moved for a better vantage and found himself watching the smoldering pile of dead animals they always kept burning. The widow tending it, in her early forties, used her stick to help the other dislodge the wildcat from her tines. When the first left, Ike watched the second douse the new arrival in kerosene and strike a match and drop it on the animal which burst into flame. The dog and cat faces in his spyglass frozen in waxen agony.
Later, as night fell, he saw a lone boy crouching in from the west, ducking through the cane. Good stealth on him. Centered in Ike’s spyglass, the boy became William R. McKissick Junior, the mule thief. Ike pursed his lips. How come he hadn’t took off like a boy with sense would of? What in the hell would keep a body
He swung his attention back to the livery barn and wondered what or who they were watching in shifts. Could be something simple as a stock animal in labor, of course, but nothing about Old Texas and its citizenry seemed simple.
He was about to creep back around to his camp when something made him freeze. He flattened himself against the ground as two old ladies and the six dazed-looking children they led passed within fifty feet of him.
Come on sugar, the ladies were saying. Come on, sweetie.
When they were gone Ike lowered his eyes. Still at it, he thought. All these years.
On the other side of the town, as he lay waiting to sneak in and find the whore, William R. McKissick Junior saw the children, too. Captured.
Dern, he thought. Now Hell Mary would be mad. He might not get his handjobs. Double-dern. He wished he hadn’t traded her the Mississippi Gambler knife. If he had it to do over, he wouldn’t trade.
Yes he would. He wished he had it to do over so he could see her titties and cooter again. That stripe of hair between her legs. Her hand on his devil’s tool as his own was now.
He got a nut and relaxed.
Naw. He oughtn’t to of traded his only knife. Especially one give to him by Mister E. O. Smonk. William R. McKissick Junior thought if he saw Mister E. O. Smonk again he would cut his thoat with that knife. He thought that if Mister E. O. Smonk hadn’t come and made Momma squeal so hard maybe she wouldn’t of kept running off. Killing a man like Mister E. O. Smonk wouldn’t be easy, though. The boy knew this. Such a man had survived dozens of attempts on his life. Man who’d shot his way out of fights up and down the map, yesterday killing a whole town’s worth of men including his, William R. McKissick Junior’s, daddy. A fellow like that wouldn’t go quiet.
But William R. McKissick Junior had picked up a thing or two about murder in all the long years of his life. Number One: Whenever you’re fixing to kill somebody using a knife, get behind them. His daddy had taught him that. Five years ago in the country of Texas America Mister E. O. Smonk had sent Daddy after that sheriff over in Throckmorton County. The sheriff had written a letter, against Smonk, to the newspaper, accusing Smonk of all
