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  In the mirror she thumped her nipples, which made them rise. She wondered about getting knocked up because she knew it made your titties grow. What she didn’t know was if they shrank back after you had the kid. Seemed like maybe they’d stay full as long as the kid sucked on them. The stickler was that she didn’t want a damn youngun to tote along, just some bigger titties. Maybe after she got the kid she could ditch it and find her a customer who’d suck the milk. There had to be men would go for that. Main thing she knew after all these years of being alive was that men existed with every possible appetite.

  She gazed at her belly and wondered how a girl got knocked up. She was as skinny as a skeleton and no matter how much she ate she couldn’t put on no fat. But you got fat when you got knocked up. Maybe it was a pill you bought or something you shot. She bet a doctor could tell her.

  The morning suffered on and she snuck down the drainpipe of the boardinghouse without paying the lady and found a window table at a dive overlooking the bay and sipped dark rum and slowly ate the cork and listened to the hurdy-gurdy and smoked hash mixed with tobacco as endless boats bobbed past and crows and seagulls dipped in the breeze. She ordered another rum. She saw a man get mugged on the wharf. She dozed for a while and woke thinking how much she loved money. She saw a shark attack a small dinghy. She visited the privy and on her return saw a pair of rats fornicating under the piano stool. The mugged man still lying where he’d fallen on the boards.

  Inside, the smoke was so thick it was like sitting in a low cave. No one who entered displayed the stylings of a doctor, though what that might have been she had no clue. She hoped it would be self-telling. A black bag maybe. One of those contraptions on the head. If somebody were to get shot, she mused, a doc would likely appear.

  She ordered another rum.

  The place stank of fish and privy. Flies and gnats so thick the wind from their wings was nearly a comfort. Because of Evavangeline’s clothing and scrubby hair, a wispy red-eyed whore floated up and said, You wanna buy a girl a drank, handsome?

  No, thank ye.

  You lean the other way?

  My leaning’s my own business.

  The whore’s husband, the famously hot-headed owner of the dive, heard her. Whoa, Nellie, he said. Hold it right there.

  He had a growth of mole the size of a man’s thumb dangling from his chin. Blackly purple with a marbling of red, veiny, sparsely haired and peeling a tad, it was hard not to stare at, jiggling as it did when he talked.

  Hell Mary, she said. Do it grow?

  Buster boy—The owner pointed a bottle of bourbon at her. If you (A) keep looking at my birthmark, and (B) ever talk to my wife like that again, I’ll (C) bust this here whiskey over ye head and make ye (E) pay the two bits the drank cost and (R) mop up the mess.

  Is that right.

  Yeah that’s right, dandy boy.

  Don’t call me no dandy boy.

  Why not? Dandy boy?

  Cause I’m dranking. It don’t do to mess with me in such times.

  That’s it. He slammed his hand on the countertop. I’m furious now.

  He tugged at a revolver in his waistband but the gal jumped up with a sawed-down singleshot sixteen from under the table. Several glasses exploded behind him and he flew backward without even flapping his arms and his bowler hat landed spinning on the bar.

  She flattened it with her open palm. I told ye.

  You damn shore did, said his widow, pouring herself a whiskey heading for the cashbox.

  Evavangeline hopped over the bar, her ears ringing. She knelt beside the man and tugged the long revolver from his waistband and checked its loads and stood up and cocked it with her thumb and closed her left eye for better aim and bit her bottom lip as was her habit when shooting and shot the growth of mole from the owner’s chin without blinking at the noise. She inhaled smoke from the barrel then grabbed the mole which was burning on one end and swaddled it in the owner’s dishrag for later study. Nobody in the place seemed to mind, not his wife, not the other patrons, not even the rats who’d dogged each other halfway across the floor, and no doctor had arisen from his chair. The hurdy-gurdy was playing “I’m a Good Ole Rebel.” Evavangeline vaulted through an open window and darted along the wharf carrying her guns, ducking ships’ moorings and upsetting a Hasidic Jew with an armload of beaver pelts.

  Still thinking about doctors, she stowed away aboard the next steamboat upriver. She had no idea where she was going but she had always been a creature of strong instinct, and north felt right. She slept on deck and stayed sober, shooting dice in the afternoons with a group of niggers. It was hot. Her head especially. The niggers were full of stories of a character they called Snert or something. She barely listened it was so hot. When the boat docked and took on passengers she would ask the gentlemen embarking and disembarking if he was a doctor.

  No one owned up.

  Then, at the muggy river town of McIntosh, one stubby Irish dribbling piss off the side of the boat admitted to Evavangeline that yes he was indeedy the ship’s sawbones and further earned her credibility when he asked, You a gal under them duds and that dirt?

  In his tiny room he lit a stick of incense and a candle which gave hardly any light. He smoked some 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 su
ck 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.

  Dragging the dead pervert toward the rail, she darted her fingers through his pockets. A silver dollar and a rabbit’s foot, obviously defective. She shoved him over the side and threw the charm after and stumbled below deck toward the doctor or phony doctor’s room. She fell over a naked man passed out drunk. It felt like the tequila was sloshing in her head. The worm tunneling through her brain. It ain’t right, what he did, she told the narrow bucking hall. She stumbled over a sleeping child. When she found the doctor or fake doctor’s door she kicked it apart and fell through the splinters.

  He sat up in bed, wearing a woman’s gown. Candles were burning. The Gramophone crackling.

  Wait! he cried. He was wearing lipstick.

  What in the world? She kicked his chamber pot aside and tugged at the revolver in her waistband. It was caught.

  The man was begging, saying he was joshing her, she wasn’t really going to die.

  To shut him up she snaked her head in and bit a hunk out of his neck and spat it on his sheets like an oyster. He gaped at her then began to scream. She unsnagged the gun and grabbed him by the waddle under his chin and shot him in his right eye and then steadying his head shot him in his left and then straight through the nose, his lips still forming words. Turning his chin left, right, she put one in each earhole at certain angles so that there was little left above the lower jaw, the top half of his head back-hanging like a hood of hair. His bottom row of teeth was intact, she noticed, her face red from his splatter. She tipped out the blood and prized free a gold molar with her knife and let him go and when he fell his head bled across the bunk like a can of paint overturned. She stepped back reloading. The gunpowder at such range had burned the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. The Gramophone’s needle had been knocked ajar and she set it back and then, for a moment of her life, as smoke curled in the air, she listened to strings of Handel.

  Anon. A lovely, leafy day. Sunlight and high cloudwork serrating the sky.

  After breakfasting on cheese and “grits” and having a productive B.M. in the reeds, Walton clopped his eager stallion along Dauphin Street, making an entry in his logbook, majestic magnolias scenting the bay air with their hearty perfumes and massive live oaks columning the street, the humid shadows back from the road half-claiming mansions stately and proud, some burnt or in disrepair from the War lo these years hence but still displaying their once-splendor in the way only ruins can.

  Behold Nature’s Holy Cathedral, Walton proclaimed, cross-stitched with Man’s finest architecture, and leavened by his will for destruction. Blessed be Thy name, Lord, that I am Thy servant proceeding on a Mission to spread Thy Gospel and dispense Thy Justice among these wretched heathens. He began to pump his fist in the air and hum “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He saluted a drunk trying to urinate on a streetlamp and in return the man brandished his middle finger or “shot him a bird” in the vernacular and cursed in French.

  Walton turned a cold profil
e and trod on. The previous night’s fireside discussion had yielded nothing except cross words that ended with several deputies trying to “lynch” poor Ambrose. Confiscating their noose, the commander had dismissed the men for some “R & R”; he suspected that most of them had gone whoring and drinking as this morning he’d found several empty liquor bottles and more than a few feminine undergarments scattered among their soiled belongings. And even snoring they’d been scratching at their privates; which, of course, meant another infestation of “crabs.” Ah, the yoke of command weighed heavy.

  Since he’d been unable to roust them from their slumber, and since the sight of the frilly, indeed diaphanous pantaloons, girdles, slips, garters, corsets, bras, et cetera, was distracting him from his mission, and because Ambrose was nowhere to be found, Walton had decided to visit the boardinghouse alone. Indeed, it might be less intimidating for his subject that way. He was brilliant, quick-witted and a charmer, Phail Walton, who prided himself on having no sexual impulse whatsoever. Nil. Nada. He used his male member to void through, and that was it. A purely functional length of hose. Voiding, he wouldn’t even touch it, would merely let it protrude and perform its task; and if it ever betrayed him and became engorged in his pants, he would pinch the purple turtle’s-head end, like Mother used to, and it would recede. When he had a night emission he would slam his fingers in the door come dawn and drink a pint of his own urine.

  The twelve or so deputies (the number varied, sometimes day to day) who accompanied him on his adventures were required to believe similarly, though not as strongly as Walton did; they never had to purposefully injure themselves, for instance. He led prayer meetings at night where the men held hands around the fire. He made them find one thing each day for which to thank God. He frowned on whiskey drinking and encouraged washing and dental hygiene. He gave his testimony frequently. He urged the deputies to commit good deeds, such as taking an old woman’s elbow as she crossed a street or thwarting a bank robbery. He taught the troops hymns and patriotic songs and had them memorize the poetry of Lord Byron and that of a startling new voice, a certain Mister Whitman: