Smonk Read online

  Not noticing the menfolk at the table talking about murder, she’d scoop William R. McKissick Junior in her lap and hug and kiss him and smell behind his ear. Her cheeks flushed. Her bosom too. You could see most of em. Just not the nipple parts. William R. McKissick Junior would try to peek down her collar to see the nipple parts and he’d get him a devil’s tool in his britches and Momma would feel it on her leg and pop the imprint of her hand into his bottom and say, You stop that. You bad boy! You stop that right this second!

  He ran fast, now, the devil stirring in his pants at the memory. He waved his new knife, accelerating to a gallop, more of the air than earth, whooping and wheeling his arms.

  For he was going at last to the woman who took in orphans! There were no other children in Old Texas and the boy wanted somebody to play with. Rumor claimed there were no rules in the orphanage ner chores neither and that you ate whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and went to bed when you chose and you could even screw the girls if you had a mind to. William R. McKissick Junior very much wanted to screw a girl. It was all he thought about. Screwing girls. Now here was his chance for some real cooter. He ran faster than he ever had before saying Cooter, cooter, cooter, cooter, cooter. Then he ran even faster than that, his new knife slicing the air like a curse on its course. If only he had the balloon.

  4 THE CROW HUNTERS

  EARLY THAT SAME SATURDAY, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE RIVER town of McIntosh and wild loamy climes north, Evavangeline happened upon a quartet of ancient horsemen in their tattered battle grays all these decades later and bearing long untidy beards the color of war. She’d lost her boots and guns to the Tombigbee’s currents and, because of her clothing and short hair, the foursome took her for a barefooted young whippersnapper as folk were wont to do in those simpler times and invited her along on a crow hunt up north ways. It was great fun, they promised, and they had whiskey.

  You thank he’s too old? she heard one ask another under his breath.

  Naw, he replied, then shushed his companion.

  What the dickens yall shushing about? Evavangeline called.

  Don’t be so testy, lad, said the man from his horse. You want a ride?

  I’d ruther not. I can’t abide me a damn horse.

  You a fool to run.

  Best not say nothing like that to me when we tap into that whiskey.

  Preciate the warning.

  Within half a day the crow hunters and their new young compatriot had arrived at a blind made of corn shucks and cane stalks and positioned in the northwest corner of a dried-out cornfield. The men dismounted as Evavangeline leaned against a tree to catch her wind. One of the crow hunters led the horses out of sight and returned later and they all knelt together and entered the blind and lay waiting, their breath meaty and rank. They told jokes on one another and passed the bottle and belched and farted so densely her eyes stung.

  You got a extry gun? Evavangeline asked the man nearest her. Faded chevron of a sergeant on his shoulder.

  Naw, he said. I jest got my three ones here.

  Well, if another one appears by holy miracle in ye waistband or coat pocket or asshole, will ye lend me it a spell?

  I will, said the man. He popped her on the rump.

  The bottle came her way again. She drank a snort. She could feel it travel the length of her body like a herd of iddy biddy horses. With little naked men mounted upon them. With every swig there were more little horses and more little men.

  A hunter told one about his army buddy getting his legs chopped off by mistake and they all laughed and one man spewed whiskey out his nose.

  Don’t be wastin that, the first hunter said.

  It’s yer turn, they said to Evavangeline. To tell one.

  I ain’t got nare.

  Got a big ole red scar, one of the men said. On ye neck yonder.

  Well, she said, there’s a story.

  She told about the time she got in a fight with two Irish. She and the Irish were hiding in an alley together. Evavangeline twelve or thereabouts. The potato-eaters, grown men, made fun of her red spot and she told them to go screw they selves. They came at her and she kicked the front one in the balls and got a fist in the jaw from the other. But his follow-through took him off balance and she uppercut him with her knee and split his lip.

  Then I slit both they thoats and rolled em, she said. Did ye like that story?

  Damnation, the hunter cried. I’m a veteran. Ever white man of my generation’s been shot. If they ain’t ye can’t trust em. I meant no offense.

  We all got scars, another man said.

  In a huff, she climbed out the back to make water.

  She was squatted there, her head cottony from the whiskey, when the veteran hooted. He’d stumbled out for a piss himself.

  Hey fellers! he called. This here high-strung one’s a split-tail!

  She tried to rise but he grabbed her ankles. He dragged her hollering and bare-assed and clawing at the turf around to the front of the blind and the others climbed out with the bottle.

  This here’s a genuine piece of tail, boys, the veteran said. He unfastened his fly and leapt forward. He prized her knees apart and began to hum “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand” and poke his dong about her thighs.

  Boy hidy, said one of the men watching. I call next.

  She tried to clamp her knees but he was in there. Then her hand happened upon the pistol he wore backward on his belt. She squeaked the gun from its holster and flipped it in the air like a circus shooter. In quick succession she shot the three men witnessing—gut, chest, neck—who hit the ground dead still holding their peckers before the fellow atop her realized she had the barrel under his chin.

  Wait, he grunted, I’m fixing to get a nut—

  But he didn’t.

  She shoved him away dead, his member still engorged and purple like an obscene mushroom. She swapt it off with his own bootknife and watched the stump blurt a rope of blood and spume like that fountain they had down in Mobile where men went to meet other men.

  Sitting in the dirt, she held her head for a while, then pulled on her pants. Insects were gathering at the edge of the pooling blood like souls needing baptism. She wrenched the boots from the veteran and stabbed her feet into them. She reloaded his revolver and shot him a few more times in the gape where his jaw had been and collected their guns and then, despite her disinclination, she found the horses where they were tied and freed three and for herself chose the tall bay with spotted legs and leapt into the saddle.

  In the afternoon the field began to fill up with crows gorging on corn. After a while they came through the stalks and gorged on the eyes of the men, and then their tongues.

  Meanwhile, time passes. The chase stretches. The men endure. Some forget who they’re chasing or why.

  But Walton never forgets. They’ve commandeered a steamship now, chugging upriver, the horses irritable, the men bored.

  A river is no place for a man, the Christian Deputy leader thinks, pacing up the deck and back. On the bank he sees a wildcat lift its dripping muzzle from a slain “razorback” hog. Walton flings his hand in the air. There! That is the life for a man. Any moment that a man is not wearing a bloody beard he is less than he can be. The leader gave a two-fingered salute. You are manly, noble wildcat! But not I, not with this, not with this, with this, this, this this this this bull-crap!

  Lord forgive the profane word I just thought in my head. My flawed human brain! No excuse but my pent-up wrath at this sinner I’m chasing. I won’t even say her name. She “galls” me, Lord. This Evavangeline. She tempts me, my Savior. They all think she’s a man but I know the truth, O Lord Savior. Mine eyes are better than mine companions’ eyes are and I was first in the door, Lord Jesus, and I know that while they are just mites, they are womanly breasts indeed, Lord Jesus Christ, and what else she had, O God in Heaven, I won’t mention in Your Devine Presence, but You of course know Yourself, don’t You, as Your Noble Lucky Hands formed it Themselves, didn’t They, Lord?
There it was, glistening, O Holy, just for the flick of a second, Lord Jesus Christ Above, and I saw it from behind! Her “cooter,” Lord! Her delicious red vulva! Lord my Christ my Healer! And thus I am forever tempted by this woman. Evavangeline. Evavangeline. Hers is the first vulva I have seen other than Mother’s, O Lamb of God O Perfect Prince. Please in the meantime forgive this hapless sinner, Lord. Amen.

  Across the deck, on Walton’s command, Ambrose was teaching the troops to read. There’d been grousing about having a Negro tutor the men, but Walton had delivered a stirring lecture about the necessity of the races getting along. It was why, he confessed, he’d chosen a Negro as his number two man. When no one seemed moved by their leader’s oratory brilliance, however, he had threatened to dock the pay of any bigot. Meanwhile, Walton spotted the tip of a bow among the troops.

  Red Man! he called, replacing his hat, securing the cinchcord underneath his chin.

  A tall red-skinned man stepped up out of the crowd of students; the bow belonged to him.

  You’re Cherokee or something, aren’t you? Walton said.

  Something.

  Don’t get “riled.” Why isn’t your hair longer? In a braid? There’s not really a C.D. rule about hair length. In fact, it might be fashionable if you were to let it grow—

  Long hair is vanity.

  Ah. Yes. We agree. I’ve been needing to “get my ears lowered” too. But listen. What’s your opinion of, if we’re tracking a certain convicted sodomite, and we’re on a steamboat, say, forging upriver, and our quarry is probably, you know, on land by now, going really fast, train or horseback, whatever, and we’re stuck here on this unholy lurching boat moving about a knot a day which is essentially not moving?

  I’m not sure I understand, Mister Walton.

  Captain Walton, please. Okay. I used to be a schoolmaster. He looked at his troop of eager readers. None of you all knew that, did you? Schoolmaster from Philadelphia. (Suddenly he ached for his chalkboard, but alas it was packed aback the mule.)

  What I mean, he went on, is that I’m adroit at explaining things. Especially with a blackboard. But let’s try it this way, Red Man. Is it okay for us to get off this unholy raft and get the horses some exercise before they go crazy, and get the men some exercise before they go crazy? We’ll gallop to the next dock and find out if she got off or stayed on. I mean he.

  I see. The tall Indian leaned his bow aside and adjusted his quiver of arrows. He frowned and pursed his lips and squinted his eyes and gritted his gleaming teeth, as if for him thought manifested itself as a severe headache.

  Walton’s thoughts ran back to Evavangeline. To that day in Shreveport when she worked the door in the tavern across from the cheap hotel where he was living. (When they “bunked” in town on rare occasions, the other deputies usually shared a room, Ambrose out back in a barn or shed as most of these establishments harbored ill feelings for Negroes. But Walton always preserved his privacy for devotionals and prayer. It wasn’t classist, he insisted to his mother in his long, florid letters, but was instead the necessary separation of leader from led.) On the day in question, he was ambling out of the barber’s from having a shave and boot shine and saw her standing in the door under the saloon’s awning. One in the afternoon. She was dressed like a schoolgirl. Pigtails. Her cheeks smattered with fake freckles. She fetchingly held a sign that said “Fuck $1” and was illustrated by a crude drawing of a man and woman copulating “doggie-style”; Walton assumed the latter was for Shreveport’s copious illiterate. The leader of the Christian Deputies stood in the middle of the street watching the girl. Then she noticed him. He couldn’t look away. A clatter of horse and buggy blocked them and then they saw one another again, his clothes flecked with mud and horseshit, a lump in his pants. She fingered the lapel of her shirt and flashed him a quick-tiny breast, startling and white in the sun and then gone, but not before he’d seen the bloodred nipple as big as a thirty-eight caliber cartridge.

  Mother! Lord Jesus!

  He’d covered his eyes with both hands and whirled, weeping. She went back inside.

  The next day he’d spent in his room. He prayed and slammed his fingers in the drawer of the desk on which he ought to have been writing dialogue for the play he’d been outlining in his logbook. He would try that. He dipped his quill in the inkwell and swirled it around. He brought it up dripping and blotted it. It was hard to write with his fingers throbbing. He made a mental note to slam his other hand next time. Painfully, he began to make a letter. Capital “B.” He followed it with a lowercase “r” and was well on his way to spelling “Breast” when he slammed down the pen. His fingernails were turning black, and he had a sudden restored memory of being dressed like a girl, his nails painted red. He covered his face with his hands and his eyes gazed out through the bars of his fingers.

  O Lord Jesus Christ comfort me in my prison of pain!

  He shut his eyes and prayed that he would be miraculously transported to another location, as when God had miraculously transported Lot and his family from the doomed sodomites in the cities of the plain. But opening his eyes he could still see the harlot out the window across the street wiggling her hips like an effigy of sin itself. Right there. In the doorway. Dressed as a squaw this time. A drunk sidled up to her and stared openly. He appraised a hand along her hip. She turned around at his behest and raised her leather skirt. O her bottom! Walton jerked his head hither and yon, discombobulating the things on his desk, but the man’s own wide buttocks blocked the view of hers.

  The Christian Deputy leader fell back onto his bed, sobbing and pinching himself.

  In a flash he was at the window again.

  Beneath the awning the drunk man was whispering in the girl’s ear, braced on her shoulder to stay afoot. She nodded and they went inside. Walton watched, his breath fogging the glass, his heart an overheated toad frying in the cauldron of his ribs. Upstairs, across the street, the harlot appeared in a window to pull down the shades. Before she did, though, he saw her lick out her tongue at him.

  Serpent!

  He tried to fill a cup with urine so he might drink it, but his turgid member refused to cooperate, the down-bending so pleasurable in itself that it nearly betrayed him.

  He had rushed downstairs right then, pants abulge, ascot atangle, and burst into the deputies’ room, where the men were supposed to be engaged in an exercise about the sucking out of snake venom. There were several empty liquor bottles scattered about the floor that, without being asked, Loon testified had been left there by the room’s previous tenants. He hiccupped.

  Men, Walton cried. Sin! He pointed upstairs.

  Thus rallied (Ambrose rounded up from witnessing to a group of degenerates playing “craps” in the alley), the entire troop lurched across the street in full uniform, several adjusting the things in their pockets, their leader seen by some to be pinching his male member through his tight pants. They entered the saloon, Red Man lowering his bow, an arrow notched, to fit inside. They bounded up the stairs, behind Walton. Red-faced, he had kicked down the door and burst in the room and away she’d flown out the window like a shade flapping up.

  Meanwhile, on the boat, Red Man had recovered from his bout of thinking. No sir, he said. Regarding your question of abandoning ship for hot, dusty horse travel overland.

  Why?

  Because to track a man is to know him. To track a man is to honor him.

  Pardon?

  Knowing and honoring a man are aspects of tracking him. In my tribe before the Wars and dark years of reservation life, before I fled east to escape the Apache and Comanche and the Pawnee and the Rangers and revenuers and cavalry men and bounty hunters, I, like you, also was a teacher. Of young braves. Sometimes the other warriors called me coward for choosing to be with the little ones instead of out earning feathers and ribbons and pieces of clothing taken from massacred white men and women and children and kept and passed father to son in a family for as many generations as the piece of clothing lasted—sometimes jus
t a scrap, the cuff from a shirt, or only a button—

  What in the world are you talking about? Walton asked.

  To track a man is to know him. To know him is to honor him. And to truly honor him (which is part of tracking him) you have to go exactly where he went, suffer his very path, riding when he rode, walking when he walked, as close as you can get, stepping when possible in his very footsteps. You finger every broken branch, touch each smudge of dirt with your eager tongue, you work at becoming him—

  Wrong, said Walton. Why would I want to become a sodomite? Captain! he called.

  A dour, scruffy man shuffled forward. Aye?

  Steer us over to the bank, sir, hard aft. The leader clapped his hands. “Pronto!”

  At this speed? We’ll run aground.

  Speed, sir? My gracious! You call this speed? Walton threw open his arms. Evolution is moving faster than we are!

  Meanwhile, the deputies learning to write had been smudging “Walton” in asbestos on the side of the boat. While they worked, chewing their lips like giant, frightening children, Ambrose plucked a pencil from his Afro and saw how many littler words he could make from “Walton.” He listed “wal,” “ona,” “alton” and “walto” (except for “w” and “l,” he drew the line at single-letter words). He added “lto” to his list then looked up and noticed that Loon seemed to have a condition where he spelled all his words backward; so when he copied the Christian Deputy leader’s name in his large, uneven characters, it caught Ambrose’s attention.

  Mister Walton, he said to his commander. You ever noticed what ye name is wrote backerds?

  Great Scott. It’s “not law.”

  The men, keen of ear, began to watch him murderously. They clattered to their feet in an asbestos cloud. Since the reading lesson, a plot of mutiny had circulated among their number. They’d decided that to earn any respect as a gang they had to kill somebody, Walton the logical choice. Ambrose next.

  Not law, they chanted, coming forward drawing out their swords. Not law, not law, not law.

  Deputy Ambrose! Walton whispered. Do something. That’s an order.