Smonk Read online

  The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

  They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

  They do not think whom they souse with spray.

  In general, the deputies were eager learners.

  What the hell—

  Language, said Walton at his chalkboard.

  Heck. What the heck do it mean, “puffed and declined”?

  Ah, said their leader. Excellent question! Anybody? Anybody?

  Nobody.

  Well, said Walton, writing, it’s a “M-E-T-A-P-H-O-R.”

  The deputies nodded.

  That’s what I knowed it was, said Loon.

  On occasion, Walton would discover one of the men drunk, “stoned,” or rubbing himself against some whore’s bottom. Or concealing a sackful of stolen money. About this subject their commander was a forgiving sort and would simply and sadly give the backslider a dressing-down, confiscate any contraband, and dock the deputy’s pay. Cursing, however, was another matter entirely. It was not tolerated. Walton could recite a list of names dozens long of men unable to retain his status as a Christian Deputy; and in nine of ten cases it wasn’t excessive robbery, murder, arson, treason or even unusual or deviant sexual proclivities but profanity that saw these men’s careers wilt.

  Walton and his deputies wore matching uniforms—duster coats, crimson shirts and khaki pants with extra thigh-pockets filled with snake-bite kits, cartridges, harmonicas, jew’s harps, spoons, flasks (medicinal only), chewing gum, telescopes, pencils, Bibles, thimbles, compasses, pocketknives, jelly beans, wire brushes, magnifying glasses and whistles, among other items. Walton supplied each man and paid a monthly wage from his mother’s dwindling bank account in Philadelphia. The deputies wore across their eyes an expensive new instrument called Dark-Lensed Goggles ($1.11 per pair). The goggles made them look like the outer-space monsters they’d been hearing about of late but cut down on headaches from the sun and theoretically gave one certain advantages in a gun battle on a bright day. The men wore identical tall black polished Creedmoor riding boots tucked crisply in their pants. They wore golden ascots. They wore stiff-brimmed hats and leather gloves with fringes. Each bore a Colt revolver on his gunbelt and a Winchester thirty-thirty strapped across his back. An imitation United States cavalry sword (half the price of the original) on his hip.

  Now, in full uniform, armed and “goggled,” Walton on his mission of reconnaissance marched across the Dauphin Street boardinghouse’s famous porch with his left hand resting on his sword handle and with his right rapped thrice on the door. The homely, bonneted woman who answered refused to cooperate unless bribed, and after having been “jewed” down from her original asking price of eleven dollars to ten and four bits, the woman spat a glob of snuff juice between two fingers and stated the name, which Walton repeated to himself in a whisper and had her spell again as he penciled it in his Christian Deputy logbook. He noticed she spelled it differently this time.

  Evavangeline, is what he wrote. Then he underlined it.

  It’s an odd name, he observed. Perhaps an alias.

  It ain’t that odd. My given name’s Yulena. Yulena Carp. What’s yern, Mister Walton?

  Phail. And it’s Captain Walton. Please.

  Fail? My word. They never give you much of a chance, did they?

  Oh! Ha, ha! he said. No, dear woman, it’s with a “P-H,” as in the scientific way to measure acidity. Now, he said, smiling, when did you last see this Evavangeline creature?

  She held up five fingers, he four, she five, he paid.

  Left two days ago, the boardinghouse proprietor-lady said. Skipped out on her bill, she did. If you wanted to make good on it, I’d appreciate it.

  Of course. Though I’m surprised you didn’t have her pay in advance.

  I would of. That’s our usual policy. But she wanted to whore and cut me in for half, ye see. And sure enough, she whored a whole day, it was a line clear out the door, then the little tart vacated without giving me my cut.

  I’m flabbergasted, Mrs. Carp, that you would allow such behavior on your premises.

  What ye got in mind?

  The woman parted her lips in what the head deputy took as an overture. Before he could stop himself and despite her advanced age, he had imagined her naked and suddenly his “bad job” (as Mother called it) sprang to life in his tight pants. Yulena Carp raised her eyebrows. Unable to pinch himself in her presence, he turned his back and bent forward and closed his eyes, imagined sawing off the hand of an innocent child. He felt himself calm.

  Excuse me. He faced her and cleared his throat. However, I’m not so sure our quarry is a “she” after all.

  Do what?

  She’s a man! We caught her. Him. In, er, congress. With another gentleman. The other gentleman swore it was a woman with whom he was in congress with, but I and my subordinates have good reason to believe that he is prevaricating.

  The Lord’s Name in vain! she hissed. How ye know?

  Walton tapped his goggle lense. From witness of these very eyes. He was—forgive me!—committing a perversion in the method of species caninus with the other gentleman we caught. Sodomy, good woman, sodomy! Ungodly, it was. The depth of wickedness. Fornicating like heinous canines. And before we could apprehend him, off she flew like a demon out the window. We provided the sinner we did catch with a good thrashing, but that other “ornery” S.O.B.—sorry old boy—has thus far escaped his come-uppance.

  Wait. You followed him all the way from Louisiana? Jest to give him a whooping?

  Walton paused. We did. We Christian Deputies are very committed to our quest. The fact of the tavern owner’s murder and mutilation is just good fortune. Our instincts feel, shall we say, vindicated. Also, we believe she “mugged” a man outside the tavern as well.

  So you seen this Evavangeline’s…? The boardinghouse woman did the Indian finger-sign for “white man’s pecker” (a hand at the crotch with the pinky hanging down).

  Oh, we “seen” it all right.

  And now you fixing to track him?

  To the end. I swear it. He tapped one of his extra pockets. On this Bible printed in Miniature.

  Say, now. She seemed distracted by his garb. Them’s nice pants.

  If you covet these “britches,” all you need do is tell me and I’ll give them to you.

  How come?

  It’s in my Christian Deputy Code. I despise things of the flesh. Objects, I mean. I’m eager to divest myself of worldly belongings. The Good Book teaches, “Fling aside such accouterment like dust in the wind.” I’m paraphrasing.

  The boardinghouse woman pointed out the parlor window. Would ye be willing to divest ye self of that horsey and saddle rig yonder? You do that you can keep them pants. And that queer tie around ye neck too.

  It’s an ascot, Walton said, gazing out to where his tall white stallion stood. Ron. The very definition of “steed.” Straight-legged, straight-backed, straight-tempered. Gun-broken. Tireless in a hunt. Eyes like amber. Terrified of chickens, but since few fowl intervened in their peripatetic lives, this was manageable. The Christian Deputy leader’s hazel eyes misted at the gorgeous gray-tipped mane he had a deputy trim and comb each morning for an hour. And the rig! Across Ron’s rippling spine sat the stock saddle that had cost his mother fifty dollars at Sears, Roebuck & Co. The finest genuine oiled California skirting leather. Sixteen inch tree. Steel fork. Beaded roll cantle.

  Yet when Walton departed the boardinghouse he did so on barefoot, having retained only his uniform and goggles, which she didn’t ask for. Perhaps she thought them his actual eyes; good country people had before. Meanwhile, the pockets in his pants hung like an octogenarian’s dugs.

  The boardinghouse woman sat on her famous porch wearing her new Creedmoor boots propped on the rail, spitting snuff juice and rolling a cigarette. She struck a match and lit the smoke and gestured to Walton’s departing back. Sign of a polecat. A
dandy boy. A large anus. The word——, for which English has no synonym.

  Upriver, dawn’s dry herald brought to the hungover steamship crew news of the pervert Evavangeline had gutted the midnight before. It went bunk to bunk in whispers and giggles. Instead of falling into the water like decent folk, the pervert had gotten tangled in a fishnet hung along the ship’s port side. Throughout the night a pulsing contingent of catfish, carp, grinnel, gar, sucker, alligators and even a few river-lost sand sharks disoriented by fresh water had followed the boat, swirling in the ooze. In the morning light, enormous orange crawfish with their pinchers clicking rode the body, one arm of which trailing in the water was festooned with moccasins attached at the fang. When one became too blooded it fell loose and sank in the clouds in the sky in the river.

  On board the steamboat came the further news of the doctor’s head shot half off in his bed, his jimmied-out molar. Bad luck for Evavangeline in that he had been not only the ship’s physician but the captain’s younger brother. More bad luck yet in that the pervert she’d knifed behind the barrels had been the ship’s cook as well as the captain’s older brother.

  She ought never drink tequila.

  The captain went about howling and throwing things from the ship. He rent his clothing and pulled clumps from his beard and rammed his head into the galley wall.

  Hungover, Evavangeline watched from beneath a tarp. When she yawned the dried blood on her chin cracked. She swiped it with the back of her hand. On the open deck somebody was telling the captain that his brother the cook had last been seen with a fellow who matched a certain description. Somebody else said that same character had been seen going below with the doc. Evavangeline, meanwhile, tiptoed to the edge of the boat and slunk over the rail like a vapor and slid down a rope. Behind the barrels, the captain’s pet spider monkey found the growth of mole from the famously hot-headed dead dive-owner and raced across the deck and leapt to the captain’s shoulder and began to earnestly screw the mole into his ear.

  He grabbed the monkey and flung it overboard. He picked up the growth of mole from the deck and glared at it. Its hairs had grown longer since last it was seen.

  It’s a shriveled banana, the first mate said, salivating.

  Naw, it’s a pickled nigger thumb, said the second mate, also salivating.

  The captain threw them both overboard.

  From the river the two thrashing officers saw Evavangeline dog-paddling toward land and tried to point her out, but the crew at the boat’s high rail was giving them the finger and mooning them and pissing on them and shooting at them. Somebody threw a pig.

  Then one of the men was snatched underwater. He came up, flung back and fore spewing bile, bit in half by the largest alligator in Alabama. The crowd went Ahhhhhh. The officer bobbed for a moment, looking very surprised. He began to point at objects and call them Robert: a cypress knee, a beaver’s mound, a dragonfly rising from the water. Then he went down again. The other officer was screaming as things began to tear at him and he went under as well and nothing remained save his woolen skull cap, tossed in waves the color of blood.

  In the meantime, Evavangeline kicked quietly toward shore, circumventing the feeding frenzy which had the men along the boat rail cheering and trying to throw one another in.

  Lord God! bellowed the captain to the sky. He began to punch himself in the face. The sailors noticed and elbowed each other. He fell to his knees. He thrust the mole heavenward and squeezed it so hard it squirted from his grip and went skittering over the deck.

  It’s a pecker! he yelled. What manner of man-eater, O Lord, have I brought upriver?

  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 even
ed 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—