manner of activities up to and including murder, by his own hand and by order. William R. McKissick Junior’s daddy had to take the boy along on the trip to assassinate the sheriff because his momma had run off again.
His daddy said it would be a good plan, though, that nobody would ever suspect a man would carry his own son with him to kill a sheriff. And if he—William R. McKissick Junior’s daddy—got killed before he finished the job, the boy was to get home by himself. Daddy said if he couldn’t find the way he didn’t deserve to get there. The boy remembered how him and his daddy took the train together and Daddy kept slipping nips from his flask. Then they loitered in the sheriff’s town for an afternoon. Jest getting the lay, his daddy said. They used fake names (the boy was Cole Younger James) and sat for an hour on the porch of a general mercantile, drinking Co-Colas and watching the jail down the way. They had oyster crackers and tobacco. Hard candy. His daddy bought him another Co-Cola and the boy drank it in one gulp and belched so hard his eyes watered and the old men who were lined up on the bench laughed. They bought him another Co-Cola and they were all burping and laughing and the old men started giving him pennies and ruffing his hair and up till his first handjob it’d been the best time of his life, that hour.
Then his daddy saw the sheriff had got back in town and they excused their selves and went behind a building. Him, his daddy said. That’s the man we’re gone assassinate.
That night they’d waited in the dark alley beside the jail. A stray dog tagged along with them—this back when dogs were everywhere. Get away, the boy’s daddy kept saying, but the dog just wagged its tail and panted.
The sheriff walked by, right on schedule. He heard the dog panting and raised his kerosene lantern and looked in the alley.
The town clock bells starting bonging.
Is it something going on back in here? the sheriff called. Is that you, Roscoe?
Hello, his daddy yelled to the sheriff. We back here. I think we got us a mad-dog, he called. It’s acting all crazy. But I’m a stranger to this town and don’t want to shoot a dog that may belong to a citizen of this very nice town. I’d like to meet the sheriff of this very nice town and congratulate him on such a pleasant place. I’ll certainly direct some business this way. If that’s what the good citizens want.
A mad-dog, say? Toting the lantern, the sheriff had bumbled back to his own death in the dark where the boy’s daddy hid behind a pole. As soon as the sheriff walked past him, his daddy appeared behind him in the yellow lanternlight and clamped his arm around the sheriff’s throat and drove his knife so far through his back that the tip came out in the sheriff’s belly and split the shirt. The lantern fell and burst. A fire started. The sheriff staggered to his knees, jerking Daddy off his feet behind him, and the boy watched as the two men struggled on the ground in the firelight. William R. McKissick Junior had begun to vomit, then, from all the Co-Cola. Ain’t you shamed, his daddy said once he stood up. He flung blood off his fingers. See if I brang you one more got-dern time.
That had been in Butler Alabama. But this was Old Texas Alabama. His daddy was dead. Killed by Mister E. O. Smonk. Same man that stole his momma. Now, William R. McKissick Junior, hidden on the edge of the town, holding his devil’s tool in his left hand, laid his head on the ground asleep, an ash of grass rattling under his nose.
Meantime, having doubled back and hidden in the trees near the three-way crossing, it was a snickering Ambrose who’d shot Onan off his horse. He would’ve shot Walton next, in the head, and then Loon, in the gut maybe, but his Winchester jammed. He’d spent the next two hours trying to fix it but gave up in the end and decided it would be good enough fun to let the fools sit there terrified, pointer-fingers buried in their pockets.
Leaving his rifle stuck in the ground, Ambrose unraveled the ascot which he’d always hated and stuffed it in his back pocket like a handkerchief. He fumbled through his pants pockets and ditched the clanking paraphernalia he’d argued against toting. A sextant? A goddamn jew’s harp? He boinged it into the shrubs and turned his hat backward which was how his father had worn hats. He rolled his sleeves up and unbuttoned his top buttons so his chest showed, its tiny black springs of hair, and retraced his steps to where his mount waited, eating poison ivy. Fool animal, he said and climbed on and donned his boots and egged the horse to a trot over the parched land, leaving Walton and Loon still on their horses, in the sun, waiting for doom. Ambrose began to whistle.
Meanwhile night with its endless lines had etched the county black, and from the west two figures conjoined in shadow negotiated the rails of the fence at the edge of the field and hobbled together across the dust toward the dark back windows of Old Texas. There were no dogs to bark the alarm, and though the ladies had posted armed guards at the well and next to the blacksmith’s place, with still another guard walking the street, they’d left exposed the rears of the stores. In broad-brimmed sombreros, Smonk and Ike disappeared between buildings and a few moments later the Negro returned and crossed back toward the cane.
At the Tate house, Smonk used a pair of nippers to pick the lock. He leaned against the doorjamb in the parlor. He held his walking cane in his right hand and a gourd in the other. The old lady Mrs. Tate snored, slumped in a rocking chair next to her husband dead on the sideboard. Odor of rot swirling in Smonk’s nostrils. Something else too. His stomach growled. She’d lain her head beside the dead man in the nest her arms made, shoulders rising with each breath she haled and falling when she let it go. Smonk wiped his lips with the back of his hand and came clicking in his bones toward her and bent at the waist and nosed himself to within an inch of her mouth. She was tiny as a child but her face was a thousand years old. Hair so thin it looked like dandelion puffs. Her veil lay on the floor next to her foot, fallen there or thrown he didn’t know.
Ike had returned in his soundless way with a pair of scatterguns, barrels sawn down the way Smonk liked them. He had Smonk’s lucky detonator and several coils of wire. His pockets full of TNT. He set it all down and indicated upstairs with his chin and Smonk watched him start to tote things up.
Without a look over his shoulder, the one-eye left Mrs. Tate to her slumber and ascended the stairs toting the detonator, resting halfway to the top and again on the landing. There was a door by his ear and he inclined his head and listened. He set the detonator box down and twisted the knob and the thing on the bed leaned its head toward him and snapped its gums. Smonk was about to go in when Ike came to the door behind him, the satchel cradled in his arms.
Eugene, he said. You ought not go in there.
Naw, Smonk said. He stepped in the room and closed the door on the old colored man and clicked its lock and crossed the floor. Moonlight enough he could see the ruined body, the contorted face. The eyes that he covered with his hand as he sank his knife in the invalid’s chest.
Meanwhile, the field in which the two remaining Christian Deputies displayed stooped posture upon their horses had seemed its brightest as the sun died over the treetops; dusk had lingered, then, but at last night had commenced its slow overland bleed, shadowing the trees and shrouding the deputies in its cloak. Loon remained convicted that pointing meant instant death, though the proof had vanished as Onan’s horse had tottered off several hours earlier, dragging the dead masturbator with it and leaving a swipe the width of his shoulders on the parched ground.
Now? Walton said. May we go?
Loon glanced around. It
Indeed. Surely yon “sniper,” if he even exists, cannot see us now, the leader said.
Yeah, Loon said out of the side of his mouth, but he might be a dang Smonk or something.
A skunk? Are they nocturnal? I suppose they are.
No, a
Is this a local “tall tale”? Walton wanted his logbook, to make a cultural entry, but was afraid to retrieve it from his thigh-pocket. His goggles hung loosely around his neck.
Well, Loon confided, some niggers thinks he’s the booger-man, I reckon. Say he goes about killing innocent white folk by tearing they dang thoats out. The ones that lives catches the ray bees and dies going mad.
Wait. Could this “Smonk” be akin to the hirsute gentleman we encountered earlier?
Do what?
The hairy gentleman in the back of the wagon? Was he a “Smonk”?
Might of been, hell. If that warn’t the booger-man the booger-man missed a good chance.
Walton gazed into the night, toward their attacker’s last known coordinates, as Loon told more gory Smonk anecdotes, and as the leader listened, he became increasingly nervous. Smonk burning down churches, eating children, laying with animals, peeing on young girls, biting people’s noses off.
Loon was saying, It was one time, he caught a fellow in the woods—
Enough! Walton said. I’m going.
