Smonk

3 THE BALLOON

MEANWHILE, IN OLD TEXAS, IT SEEMED THE BAILIFF’S BOY WITH THE balloon had vamoosed with the mule, and for a moment, a revolver in his left hand and sword in his right, E. O. Smonk had given the line of horses shirking at the rail his savage consideration. But he detested the preening highnesses and now could be found hobbling east along a row of storefronts, ducking bullets and favoring his gouty foot and using his sword as a cane and firing the revolver over his shoulder. Thinking Next time jest take a fucking horse.

Across the street, the mercenaries covered Smonk’s escape from their wagon, one firing the machine gun while the other readied a second lock and added water for coolant. The man at the trigger was screaming as he obliterated the hotel, shutters snapped off their hinges and posts sawed to dust and windows dissolving to silver mists and shingles flapping off and one short board twirling in the alley like a child.

The panicked horses kicked and rolled, a roan’s head gone, a rumpshot bay burying its hind hooves in a sorrel’s stomach, nails shrieking and wood splintering as the horses drew the rails away like a curtain, buckling the upstairs deck, the back of the building suddenly ablaze with fire, men spilling onto the porch dancing as if on stage, in their dying poses flinging out their arms or backflipping with their boots left upright on the floor. They cursed and cried to Jesus. They fingered their holes to dam the blood. They tried to remember how their legs worked. What their names were. They raised their palms but the bullets were true to the faces behind, a cheek gone, a lower jaw, grin of false teeth clacking to the floorboards and one shot-off finger pointing through the air still bearing its wedding band.

Fire leapfrogged over the floors, peeling up doorjambs and across the ceiling and walling the air with smoke. When the man at the trigger paused to let the other change locks, the citizens in the hotel began to clamber away from the fire by jumping through windows. They lurched from the ruined porch, some with their hats and coattails on fire, but froze when they saw a third man striding toward them in the smoke, stepping over bodies in the dirt, a German automatic rifle in one hand and a stick of dynamite fizzing in the other.

At the bottom of the hill, lumbering along panting for air, Smonk felt the concussion of the explosion before he heard it. Windows shook and shook the widows’ faces behind, faces already flinted into the masks they’d wear to the grave. Then he heard the Maxim resume its work. He tipped an imaginary hat to a widow on her steps trying to cock a rifle with both thumbs with a result of shooting herself in the foot. He was still chuckling when the undertaker’s widow appeared from a doorway holding a revolver in both hands and shot him broad in the chest. His gourd exploded but otherwise unharmed he grabbed her with his sword hand and danced her around and pulled her face to his and kissed her flush on the mouth and when he let go he’d taken her pistol and she bore his blood on her lips like paint, her back braced against the wall behind her.

He popped off the gun’s four rounds in three seconds and tossed it away and turned a second corner into an alley and shrugged out of his coat and left it crumpled in the dirt, his shoulders jerked by a fit of coughing and sneezes that mapped the oak trunk before him bright red.

He was edging down the alley when glass shattered by his head and a rifle barrel nosed out. Still coughing, he grabbed it from the widow’s fingers and looked it up and down with his good eye. Marlin repeater, full magazine judging the weight. He caught the hand swiping from the window and crushed its fingers like a sack of twigs and began to limp, again firing over his shoulder, levering with a flick of his wrist, ducking as a shot apothecary’s sign swung from its chain like a pendulum. A nail sparked by his foot and a post splintered by his cheek, but that was the closest they came to killing him as Smonk broke the empty rifle over his knee and burst into the livery barn. He saw no mule, donkey or pony and had little choice but the tall gray mare in the first stall, the only animal saddled and bridled. The livery attendant’s widow charged screeching from the dark holding a pitchfork woven with hay but he parried it with his sword and knocked her aside. He’d wiggled his good foot into the stirrup when she attacked again with a snub-nosed pistol. He snatched it away and smashed the gun into her cheek and flung himself onto the horse and told it Git.

The gray kicked boards loose in the wall behind and swung its head and tried to bite him but he punched its muzzle away and evened the reins. The woman grabbed his saddle strap as Smonk dug his heels in the horse’s flanks and they trundled her through the dust in the bay door and left her balled on the ground. A wave of cinders blistered past: Adios, Tate Hotel. Smonk fired the snub into the sky to get the horse’s attention and soon had her majesty goaded to an awkward lope. He looped the reins around his fingers and whacked her rump with his sword until the ground drummed beneath them and they hurtled across the railroad tracks and east, clinking bottles on the bottle tree, gunfire fading behind like a celebration of fireworks.

When it was safe he blew a mouthful of frothy blood and aimed the pistol and centered the last bullet through the gray’s left ear. The horse leapt a crossfence and whinnied and twisted in the air in some fit of pain or ecstasy and landed with the squat rider bouncing and low, the pair blurring, elongating, barely a hoof to earth, inspired by God or bespooked by the devil who could tell.

Meanwhile Will McKissick, the bailiff, coughed himself awake. Pushing a body off his own, he sat up plastered in gore. I’m in Hell, he thought. Things around him were moving and hot. Vaguely he heard gunshots. Screams. He fought to his knees, half aware of the dead and dying on the floor. Place shot to pieces. Air boiling. Splinters of glass stuck in the walls.

He fanned his face. Remembered being eight years old, the first time he’d used a slingshot and pebble to pick a hummingbird out of the air. Under a mimosa tree not long before his daddy got shot. He remembered knowing from that moment onward that he was a bad boy who would grow into a bad man. Then he’d pegged another hummingbird, a hatchling just out of the nest, no larger than a bumblebee.

He steadied himself against the wall and coughed and pounded his chest. But those birds were in the past now. Them and everything else. Lately, despite the long, varied and original chart of sins awaiting him in the devil’s ledger, he’d been fighting his evil inclinations and had broken his associations with the outlaw element and even settled down. An honest bailiff job. Several choices to marry. Redemption his target, no matter how long the shot. There was something round and blue in his brain. He could almost imagine it, but—

Smonk!

McKissick looked around. He wasn’t in Hell. This was only its anteroom, Old Texas Alabama, where moments ago E. O. Smonk had grinned blood and drawn a sword from the air and conjured a pistol by brazen will and squirted out his eye.

McKissick opened his fingers. There it was. His breath whistled out. White glass marble with a few nicks. Blue dot in the middle. Warm. He smelled it. He rolled it in his palm and pecked it with his thumbnail. It seemed to be looking at him. He popped it in his mouth where it clicked against his teeth.

His head snapped. Gunshots! He skipped through the dead to the window and double-took when he saw two men in a wagon reloading—was it?—a got-dern Gatling gun, the design of which he’d never seen, a steam cloud hovering around them like a halo. Water-cooled. Fancy.

Expensive.

They ain’t after no picture-graphs, he said to himself. Dern, I ought to knew it. Ye done got soft, Will, thoughts of revenge plus all these women at ye.

For he himself in his official capacity had questioned the strangers at their wagon before the trial. He himself the town bailiff had been convinced of their sincerity when they demonstrated the use of their camera, having him pose with his hair flattened by oil and a grimace on his face while they huddled together at the device under a blanket. Their intention was common practice, McKissick knew, to make a picture of a dead body, which would of been Smonk if things had gone according to plan. (Often the New York Times would pay a dollar for a picture of lynched niggers or shot-up outlaws. Those wily photographers would change the body—shave the fellow, say, or add an eyepatch—and send it back for another dollar.) As McKissick had stood getting his picture made, not one hour before, a number of the ladies had gathered to watch and he’d been buffaloed, proud to be the subject of artists.

Now something moved in the street. Justice of the Peace Tate, easily recognizable by his pompadour, was crawling through the dirt away from the murderers, blood strung from his chin.

McKissick saw a third killer by the hotel, a rifleman—probably the one who’d set the building afire—waving his arms so the men in the wagon wouldn’t shoot him. He hurried through the street, sticks of dynamite in his back pockets. When he reached the justice, he shouldered his rifle and drew and pointed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and fired. Dust puffed by his foot as a bullet missed him and the gunner turned the Maxim on its swivels