fucking eye?
First tell me where my boy is.
Smonk pushed McKissick’s head away like a tent evangelical and the bailiff backpedaled toward the detonator and fell beside it and knocked it askant with his broken arm.
Get up, killer. Smonk checked the 45-70’s loads and snapped the gun shut and lurched over to McKissick, the room seeming to tilt with his weight. Give me my eye.
The bailiff had no strength left and no feeling in his broken wrist. His side was bleeding, his head felt like an anvil. He noticed the detonator and spidered his good hand up to the corner of the casing and seized the bottom of the plunger the way a man grips an ax.
Back, he panted, or I’ll blow it.
Including ye boy, Smonk said. He’s down yonder other end of town with a bunch of younguns these old whores stold. Auntie here and her coven of witches is fixing to turn they mad-dog on em.
McKissick’s grip failed and his hand melted from the handle. Willie? He’s here?
Smonk had advanced. He edged the detonator away with his foot and touched the fallen man’s throat with the tip of his sword and traced it down his gullet, slowly, a long welt in its wake and then a faint line of blood.
My…Willie? McKissick gasped.
Smonk straddled the bailiff and sat so hard upon the man’s chest that blood spewed out of his mouth and burst like a fist from his wound, a penny like magic in Smonk’s fingernails.
Here’s ye tip, bailiff, he said. I thank ye for my rifle’s safe return.
I would, McKissick gasped. Wouldn’t take no penny from you—
I insist, Smonk growled, and with a slight lift of his eyebrows he ground the coin into McKissick’s left eye socket with his thumb. Under him the man’s shoulders shuddered and his legs kicked and floundered. Mrs. Tate screamed until Smonk reached his free hand up and cranked the broom handle and she blacked out. Meanwhile the one-eye had snaked his long trigger finger around the side of the bailiff’s head and dug it into his earhole. He wormed it deep in the canal past a spongy substance until his finger touched his thumb.
Two hummingbirds, McKissick’s mouth said without sound. Father and son.
And he expired.
Smonk groped to his feet using a rail of wainscotting and lifted the man once an assassin, once a bailiff into the air by his head and held him there limply like a large catfish and raked his sword down McKissick’s front. Among what sloshed across the rug was one rolling eye.
Evavangeline trotted to the edge of the woods and kicked off her shoes and scrabbled up an oak and wove to the tree’s topmost where the capping branchwork was thin as her own interlaced fingers. She swayed among the leaves as if she weighed nothing at all, the dark squares and rectangles of Old Texas in the distance like blocks laid out by a child and painted otherworldly by the moon’s red glare. This town Ike had called cursed by God for what it did. Where the people reached. What they pulled out.
She’d said,
Ike hadn’t answered except to say,
Now in the sky the girl’s hair blew. It was up to her. Kill the women. Rescue the children. Don’t see Smonk. Well hell Mary, she told the air.
Back at the campfire, Walton stepped out of the bramble behind where the old Negro had lain down. The Philadelphian had a cudgel of wood for his weapon and was half-drunk from his flask. As he closed in on the prone man, he raised the log high.
You gone hit me with that, the Negro said, make it a good shot. Jest one, if ye will.
Walton’s club froze. He circled the fire lowering his arm until he could see the man’s face. There was blood on the ground and an empty pail.
The lost Mountie, said the Negro.
Yes. It is I, Phail Walton. We met earlier. I’m afraid I’m somewhat tipsy.
Forget earlier, the man said. It seemed to hurt him to speak. You been spying on me bout a hour, so you know you got to go help that girl. Help her git them younguns out that town fore Smonk blow ever thing up or them ladies feeds em to they mad-dog.
Sir, Walton said. Excuse me. I have a few question, if you don’t—
But the man’s eyes had closed.
Sir?
Walton waited in the immensity of trees. Around them the night. When he looked up he saw how far- scattered were the stars which were but an infinitesimal amount of God’s power and reach. The unscrolling dust cast by His hand.
He knelt at the Negro’s side and folded the man’s hands over his chest and placed the Danbury hat over his face. He relieved him of his scattergun and a skinning knife. Had he his logbook he’d have written a receipt. Then he was glad he didn’t have it. He closed his eyes. Lord, he prayed silently, I do not know this man from your own Adam made from dirt, but I cannot name a thing I’ve witnessed of him that causes me to question his integrity. In fact, one thing I can truthfully say of him is this: “He hath bested a fool.” Travel with me, O Lord, on this journey to save Thy children. I ask it of You in Your Own Name. Amen.
Meanwhile, Evavangeline descended the tree like something poured down its trunk and landed in a crouch. She left her shoes on the ground and ran through the woods and fields to the outskirts of Old Texas. She watched the row of houses in back of the stores, the dark windows. She scampered unnoticed by the moon over the dry grass toward the first house and entered through the back door, easy as it was to pick with a nail.
Inside she sank to all fours and skittered over the floorboards and crept along the wall in the front room. Here was the town’s dead lawyer displayed on his own desk and his widow asleep in her chair, head thrown back. Evavangeline circled her on the floor and twined through the chair legs and buried her head in the lady’s skirts. She chose the left calf and warmed the skin with her breath then kissed it open-mouthed, nuzzled the soft meat, slowly latching on. Above her the widow stirred but Evavangeline chewed so gently the crone only sighed and slumbered deeper into a dream of the trip south early in her life when her family slept beneath the wagon and a coral snake crawled into Uncle Lloyd’s bedroll and bit him several times. Uncle Lloyd never woke because such a snake chews, doesn’t strike, its poison in.
At the town clerk’s house she found his widow strewn across her bed, the husband unattended in the next room, his humors puddling on the floor. Evavangeline lay on the bed alongside the woman’s thigh and peeled down her stocking and kissed her behind the knee and tongued the mole that grew there and rubbed her teeth against the skin as the woman shifted and groaned and the girl nibbled and tasted blood and closed her eyes. Her skin buzzing and hot. In one house the stolen children were sleeping on the floor and their guard sleeping in a rocking chair. Evavangeline bit the guard on her side and, as she crawled through a window, one little girl raised her head but saw only drapes flapping.
Evavangeline found the liveryman’s widow awake, gazing at the empty jail cell, and used a hoe to knock her flat and bit her under the right tit which had plopped out of her dress when she fell. She found the doctor’s widow tied to her chair but asleep and without wondering at this oddity gnawed the ray bees into her calf which was shaved and soft.
She dropped from a rafter behind the guard at the blacksmith’s and boxed her ears and slugged her across the face and left a reddening imprint of her teeth on the left cheek of the woman’s ass and at the opposite end of town shattered a bottle from the bottle tree over the guard’s head and bit her on the neck. She bit Mrs. Hobbs, the undertaker’s widow, on her nipple and the woman convulsed but never woke. On through the town, house to house, widow to widow, calf to armpit to lower back to thigh, the women dreaming of moist sugarcane you bite and suck. Of their nursing babies of long ago, the pricks of pleasure from their first teeth. Of Snowden Wright in his heyday as he swung his ax in that onehanded way of his, visiting each lady as he did in the dark hours and ministering to their needs as their husbands would have had they not been off killing and dying.
Lastly she walked along the street with dust curling over her feet. Evavangeline Smonk. In her left hand the Mississippi Gambler and in the right a four-ten snake charmer unclenched from a sleeping widow’s hand. She had
