Ghost Town: A Novel (19 page)

Rifle now cocked and ready, he peers cautiously out the gaping hole where the street door used to be and sees that no boots will be ascended today, his or any other’s. The debris of the gallows, wrecked by the black mare, has been mostly blown away by the storm, nothing left in the wide dusty street but a few scattered splinters like frail bleached reminders of some previous resolve. Now what there is of intent can be measured only by the ominous absence of any evidence of it, for nothing moves. Not even the lace curtain in the window above the saloon sign. The weathered wooden buildings, utterly forsaken under the baking sun, look fatigued and shrunk into themselves, a grim dead silence sunk into everything the way drink can sodden a man. But that they are waiting for him out there some place, or places, of course he has no doubt. The moment for it has come.

Across the way the bank doors are hanging loose off their hinges as usual, and though it’s about a hundred yards across a wide-open space, masonry’s a better shield than timber, and he figures if he could make it over there he might have more of a chance, or at least last a little longer. He exposes himself briefly on the jailhouse porch, then ducks back inside. Nothing happens, so he checks his six-shooter (a single shot’s been fired; he reloads it), tugs his broad-brimmed hat down over his brow as though felt might fend off lead, cleans his ears out, and gets ready to run. There’s a kind of presence out there, like a filled-up space inside the empty space that’s seen, created by the portentous hour and walled by nothing but its own taut necessity, and when he enters into it, there’ll be no way out until it isn’t there anymore, or he isn’t.

A piece of the jailhouse wall behind him suddenly topples inward, breaking the solemn hush: he whirls to fire, but there’s no one there, and then, even as he watches, another piece of wall folds over like a starched collar and, after a creaking moment, slides wearily to the floor with a splintering crash. Yes, all right. Time to go.

He hunkers down, counts to three, and then charges off on a zigzagging run into the street, heart and legs pumping, expecting the whole world any moment to explode around him and bring a sudden searing end to things. This doesn’t happen, not yet, but crossing that space seems to take him years, his boots pounding and pounding the dusty arena where the gallows once stood, his hands sometimes slapping it as well as he ducks and bobs, the distance between him and the bank seeming to lengthen even as he scrambles toward it, and he feels as if caught up in one of those endless tribal hunting dances, he the designated buffalo-headed prey—or the mock prey, maybe it’s all the same—his churning legs benumbed and leaden now and his cumbersome head weighing upon his neck and bobbing on its own for lack of strength to do otherwise. He’s not going to make it across, it’s too far. He can no longer rise from his staggering crouch, it’s all duck and no bob, his wind is going, his hat’s already gone, shot away maybe, if they are shooting at him, can’t be sure, what with the blood roaring in his ears, his sight bleared by sweat and desperation.

But then, just as his knees are giving way, he stumbles upon an old buckboard with a broken wheel, which he hadn’t noticed out here before but which has somehow made itself available to him, and he rolls under it and from there pitches himself over a hitching rail and flattens out behind a foot-high wooden porch, gasping for breath, his gun aimed at the buildings across the street. He wipes the sweat from his eyes with his shirtsleeve and scans the rooftops, the dark places, the edges of things. Nothing. Same as before. A deathly stillness. Only thing exceptional out there is his black slouch hat, lying in the sun like an objectless shadow, foreboding as dynamite with a lit fuse. He glances up at the dust-encrusted window above him:
GOLD!
it says in peeling gold lettering.
CLAIMS OFFICE
. It’s an old frame building, not as sturdy as the bank, but it’s where he is and the door is agape, its hinges sprung, so he lurches forward and ducks inside.

He sweeps the interior with his six-shooter, his back pressed to the front wall, but the place is empty, thickly coated with layers of ancient grime, disturbed only by his own boot and hand prints in from the door. He slumps back against the wall, his lungs heaving, surveying his refuge. A flimsy and desolate one-room structure with a collapsing ceiling and a plenitude of uncovered windows all around, already pocked with stray bullet holes; he could hardly be in a worse place. On the counter there is a sign,
TAKE ONE
, but the box in front of it is empty, the cards that were in it scattered and dulled with dust where they lie, as if to say this seam’s long since played out. One of the cards is on the floor by his boot, face-down. Probably ought to leave it there. There was an educated man he knew once, a gambler who had made millions on the river and who then had drifted west for richer and easier pickings and had made more millions, until he lost not his luck but his ability to control his luck, and what he told him one night over the last beer he can remember drinking was: If you have lost the feel of the cards, son, and have to draw blind, don’t draw. But he does, knowing what card it will be even before he picks it up, a card he’s been dealt before. There are some coordinates inked on its face with numbers and symbols he does not understand, but where they cross at the slender black waist a word is written:
SALOON
.

He pockets the two-faced card after wiping the dust off on his pants, thinking about solitude and how he longs for it always, but cannot and even would not have it, and turns to stare out the front window, past the backwards
GOLD
(the gold paint is an oily black on the inside) toward the old town saloon across the way with its hanging sign, its swinging doors like folded wings, its still white curtain. It’s a kind of challenge, a dare, and one meant for him and him alone, he feels, even if the card’s been there forever and anyone might have passed by and picked it up. It’s also no doubt a trap. Whole nest of them holed up over there probably, just biding their time with wide gap-toothed grins on their messed-up faces, knowing he’ll be coming over sure as a fly’s sucked to a turd because it’s who he is and he can do no other. Well, and what if he could, what if he told them all to go to hell and just got up and walked out of this pesthole? Wouldn’t work. Everywhere he turned the town would still be there, the saloon in front of his face like an accusal and a taunt. Taint whether, as an old prospector once put it, but how. Well. That moribund fellow also declared that the good news was that everything passes. Or somebody did.

So he settles his six-shooter back in its holster and steps with measured strides out on the porch and down into the dusty street, not hurrying, passing the buckboard carriage kneeling toward him on its broken wheel and, a bit further on, his abandoned hat, lying there in the middle of nowhere in its black crumpled loneliness (Solitude! a malodorous old trapper remarked one day with a rueful snort: Shore we love it, kid, it’s whut decoys us out here, but it aint nuthin but a pipe dream, like findin a mountain a gold or fuckin angels), but not holding back either, no longer afraid of what might be hidden in things or behind them, until he reaches the wooden sidewalk in front of the saloon. There he pauses in that blinding sunlight and he sets his legs apart and he shouts out: Awright! Here I am! C’mon out ifn yu aint too afeerd! His scratchy voice echoes hollowly, as if he were standing at the bottom of a canyon, and that is the only response there is. He can barely speak for how dried out he is, the frantic run from the jailhouse having sucked all his liquids out, so he decides he has said all he’s going to say. He proceeds onto the wooden sidewalk and up to the doors, his boot heels clocking on the planks, then steps to one side to peer in the window. Nothing but a dark cobwebbed and dusty murk in there. Busted furniture strewn about, broken lamps and bottles, the old grand piano fallen face forward as if to bite the floor with its sad scatter of chipped teeth, someone’s yellow suspenders trailing from a tipped brass spittoon like spilled chicken guts.

He steps back and considers all of this, looks about him. The only sign of life is his own hat out in the middle of the empty street. He has misjudged everything. The town’s been abandoned. He’s all alone. His shoulders sag and he realizes how tired he is, a tiredness got not only from his physical exertions but also from all the hard thinking he’s been doing. Now all he need think on is finding something wet to unstick his tongue from the top of his mouth. Then worry about a horse. Not sure where to go looking for one of those beings, but if there’s anything left to drink in town it has to be near to hand. He turns to enter the saloon and the swinging doors fly open and smack him full in the face, send him tumbling backwards, head over heels, into the street. He can hardly see from the tremendous eye-watering force of the blow, but he gets off a shot at the doors even before he hits the dirt. No one there, of course. The doors rock on their hinges for a moment and then fall still. He touches his nose. Yes, broken. Not for the first time. Not a structure made for this country.

As he lies there on his back with that throbbing pain in the middle of his face, he realizes that the town is leaving him and taking the day with it. The claims office, the jailhouse ruins, and steepled church are already some distance off, their long shadows darkening the desert. The bank follows, dragging its doors. The stables and dry goods store. He touches the card in his pocket to be sure it’s still there, estimating that it represents all that he has earned from his lonely travails, all else a figment and a haunting, and it but a sign of them. The saloon is the last to go, as though overseeing the general retreat, and when it, too, is some distance away, the lace curtain in the upstairs window flutters briefly as though waving goodbye. And then it is night, and there is nothing to be seen except the black sky riddled with star holes overhead.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portions of
Ghost Town
first appeared in
Conjunctions, Marvels
&
Tales, journal of Fairy-Tale Studies
, and
Playboy
.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert Coover

ISBN: 978-1-4532-9674-5

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