Smonk

skunkweed without offering to share and cranked his Gramophone and after a few loud pops some scratchy fiddles played slow and sad. She was naked, elbows and knees on his bunk, blindfolded by the silk cloth he said the Hypocritic Code called for. He popped his knuckles and spat on his finger and wormed it up her chute and wiggled it.

It’s a dollar, she repeated. I done told ye.

How’s that feel, aye? he asked. He inched in another finger.

How’s what feel?

He withdrew and sniffed the fingers.

What the hell can ye tell from that, doc?

Ye mineral content, for one thing, he said. Ye ’ve got a strong sulfur ardor. Odd. How bout this, aye?

There was a rustle of clothing. Behind the blindfold her eyes rolled. Here it came. He grasped her hipbones and grunted and worked a slightly bigger thing in.

This is the old Druidic way of examining patients, he explained. From the Bible or Montgomery Ward catalogue one. I’m an avid reader. We train our fleshly tools here to be especially sensitive, like a thermometer only in all modesty somewhat bigger, and for a fee of two dollars we can dispense a kind of miracle salve into the anal rectum and uuuuuh—

She’d contracted her nethers as Ned had taught her—done correctly, as effective as grabbing a man by the throat.

He was gasping, pounding her back.

Is that ye pinky? she asked, her teeth gritted.

Inside her it shriveled. She loosed her clench and let him pull it out. She got up and sat with her legs hanging off the bunk and removed the blindfold. I said it was a dollar.

You bitch. He fisted the wall and the record skipped. I know jest what yer eaten up with. What disease, I mean. You reek of it. And there ain’t no cure.

Are you really a doctor?

He laughed.

Will it land me dead?

You’ll be curious about that fer a spell, aye? He laughed more. Now get out of my room you lice-ridden heathen and jump off this boat, before I tell em what you really are.

Simmering mad, she climbed back atop the deck to seek another opinion. She determined this time to request proof of medical accomplishment. A note you got from finishing one of them doctor schools. She couldn’t read but expected she could judge it from the quality of the paper. Hell, even a tooth-puller would do. What did he mean what she really was? What was she?

She looked about the deck. Perhaps she could show the famously hot-headed dead dive-owner’s growth of mole. If someone could identify it, it would indicate medical knowledge.

She waited in the sun with the niggers from the dice game. Telling their crazy stories. She bit her fist. That Irish doctor. Fake doctor. Whatever he was. She smashed a horsefly on her neck and threw it in the water where a shellcracker was waiting to suck it under the waves. One of the niggers told her the way a girl got knocked up was by laying with a man and she disbelieved him. She dug the mole from her pocket and unspooled it from its rag. She sniffed it, she held it up by a long hair and watched it point north. She drew a knife from her boot and poked it. The black parts were softer. She touched it with her tongue.

No other man crossing the gangplank in McIntosh admitted to the medical arts, though, and presently the boat shrilled its steam whistle and sucked its paddlewheel to life and they lurched off. A couple of jokers fired pistols in the air, and as the scorched landscape wrenched itself past like a beaten army, Evavangeline realized that for the rest of her life she would wonder if she was dying.

Meanwhile, a number of whores and several sots had witnessed the murder and mutilation of the famously hot-headed owner of the dive.

The well-dressed troop of Christian Deputies who’d whipped (and then released) the gal’s sexual co- conspirator in Shreveport had tracked her to Mobile, and within two days Walton had bribed most involved and found where she’d resided during her week in the bay city: a boardinghouse on Dauphin Street. Of some repute. A blind man running for state representative had dined there once. And on a separate occasion a dysenterious matador from Atlanta had used its privy for the better part of half an hour. And then, the coup de gras, that long extemporaneous political debate on Populism between Professor Emeritus R. M. Brutus Theodore “Patch” McCorquodale IV, Ph.D., and Bud Rope. Right on these here boards, the “half-breed” proprietor-lady was known to say, tapping her walking cane. Her two halves were Caucasian and Indian, if Walton’s re-search was as accurate as he believed it to be.

Why in the world would the perverted sodomite they were pursuing choose such a high-profile locale?

With the bay tapping the sand and forever astonishing the crabs beyond the rim of their campfirelight, Walton led a discussion among his Christian Deputies where they sat in good posture after a meal of liver and kidney beans, earnestly dissecting their quarry’s character. Aside from the men being a bit gassy it was pleasant. The leader had a small chalkboard and stand on which he drew diagrams, charts, maps, and stick figures. He wrote words and underlined them. “CLASS.” Didn’t their misguided prey feel out-of-his-element there in the famous boardinghouse? Among “GOOD” (Walton wrote furiously) “PEOPLE”? Why wasn’t he sleeping in an alley, or in a seedy hotel, where “TRASH” traditionally stayed and where “SIN” took place? Did he feel safer there? Less conspicuous? Or was he trying to rise above his “STATION”? And if so, “WHY”?

What’s our station, Mister Walton? inquired a tall one-eared deputy with his shirttail out. He’d raised his hand.

Walton had written, “A-R-I-S-T-O-C-R-A-” but paused. Why do you ask? Loon, is it? And please, call me Captain.

Well, the deputy said, it lines up like this here. I prefers me a cathouse to a boardinghouse. I’d ruther sleep on the ground than in some bed. Do that make me trash?

Why certainly not, Walton said. Deputy Ambrose, tell him.

Ambrose looked puzzled. He scratched his “Afro” which had a knife handle protruding from it. He came over to Walton and on tip-toes whispered, I thank that ’n is trash, Mister Walton.

What ’d that little nigger say? Loon asked his buddy.

Nonsense. All of it! Walton dusted chalk from his gloves. By virtue of my being a “Yankee,” he announced, I hereby deem you all worthy.

He raised his hand sartorially.

There, he said. Anything else?

Farther north, the steamship shouldered up the brown ribbon of the Tombigbee, shrunk by the drought to half its width and narrower for oncoming boats and lower for stobs. On board, Evavangeline had run out of money. Long about midnight she swiped a black gourd of tequila from the galley and drank it. She let a thin dapper Irish in a dirty white chef’s hat lead her to a hidden spot on the deck behind some empty whiskey barrels with dead moss between the slats.

It’s a dollar, she said, turning to give him access.

I like hair, he whispered. Under the armpits. I like to smell armpits.

Did I say—ouch!—it was a dollar?

He had his hands down her pants, groping about, lifting her feet off the deck.

Where’s ye member? His tongue a hot leech in her ear.

My what? Where’s my dollar?

Yer big ole cock-a-doodle-do. I want to suck on it, honey.

You pervert. She spun and shoved him darker into the barrels. She hitched up her pants and patted her sleeves as if to dust herself of his deviance.

I’ll have ye ass, the chef said. He came at her growling in his throat, a pug of a man now, glint of a paring knife in the moonlight. But even drunk she dodged and his blade slit no deeper than her shirt. He switched hands like a knifefighter and jabbed at her again but she was suddenly behind him with her arm around his neck and a hawkbill blade hooked in his gut.

Aye, he said. Killed me.

She looked around but the watchman had passed out on deck like a sack of manure.