The Ballad of Dingus Magee (21 page)

“Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly call these peaceable,” the officer yelled back, scarcely in need of the irony as a new hail of bullets whistled and chinked overhead. “But at least they’ve most likely done us the favor of dispatching your outlaw friend for you, since he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of us coming through the—”

“But my trunk!” Belle wailed. “My safe! Where’s—”

And then the shooting stopped, abruptly but absolutely. Hoke himself had not previously moved, save to dissociate himself from the trooper’s bottom. But when the silence persisted he finally raised his head, finding the others near him beginning to better deploy themselves also, behind what appeared a fairly secure natural barricade, a fortuitously banked upheaval of jagged split shale. “And now what?” Belle was demanding. “What are they—?”

“Just regrouping, I’d imagine,” Captain Fiedler speculated. “Or maybe debating an attack, since it’s pretty much a stalemate the way we’re situated at the moment.” Hoke could see the youthful officer kneeling, eyeing the terrain. Then the man turned to his sergeant, indicating something behind Hoke himself with a gesture, speaking more quietly.

Hoke saw it also, however, comprehending. Close at hand,
yet probably obscured from the vision of the Indians themselves, a narrow crevice broke upward through the shelving toward higher ground. And almost immediately the sergeant darted toward it, obviously for purposes of reconnoitering.

“I’ve got a hunch we can outflank them,” the captain elaborated. “It might work if we’re not too badly outnumbered, which we don’t seem to be. Let’s hold fire and wait, now—”

So they sat. Nor did the Indians renew their own fire either, except for those moments during which random troopers showed themselves fleetingly, evidently satisfied merely to hold the patrol at bay. Then for some moments only Belle’s irrecusable mutterings alone punctuated the calm:

“That lamb-ramming, rump-rooting, scut-befouling, fist-wiving, gopher-mounting, finger-thrusting, maidenhead-barging, bird’s-nest-ransacking, shift-beshitting, two-at-a-time-tupping lecherous little pox. On top of which he wasn’t born either, he was just pissed up against a wall and hatched in the sun. I’ll—”

But the sergeant finally reappeared, though it struck Hoke at once that something boded ill. In fact the man made his way toward them so thoughtfully, and in such evident distraction, that he almost exposed himself more than once. And then when he reached the captain for a long moment he merely stared, not saying a word.

“Well, drat it all, did you see them, man? What’s the—” And still the sergeant seemed wholly disconcerted, although at last he nodded. “I saw them. Yessir. Right clear in fact. But—”

“And? So? Can we take them? Can we get—”

“We could take them easy. Yessir. But the thing is, we can’t. I mean we can’t fight. Because—”

“Can’t fight? Says what? There aren’t that many of them, are there? And if there’s a good tactical approach from—”

“It ain’t that,” the sergeant said, although still he seemed incapable of coping with whatever it might be instead. “I mean we don’t even need tactics. But that’s the whole point.

I mean, it’d be almost too easy, because it ain’t Injuns. I mean, I reckon they’re Injuns all right, but—”

“Listen now, listen!” Captain Fiedler struggled to check his anger. “Sergeant, are you sick? Will you for heaven’s sake tell me what’s—”

“It’s squaws.”

“It’s—what?”

“Squaws. Ain’t one single buck warrior down there; not a one. You kin hang me for a chicken-stealer if’n every single Winchester ain’t being shot by a female. And—”

“But—but—ambushing a patrol of United States Cavalry?
Squaws?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Well, it don’t
sound
no more loco than it
looked,
I reckon. But it’s even more loco’n that. Because there’s some men down there too, all right, maybe ten or a dozen of’em, but they ain’t fighters—jest the old limp-dicked kind you see on reservations, maybe. And there’s a decent-size remuda likewise, like the whole outfit’s migrating somewheres, or was, until say no more’n ten or fifteen minutes ago. But now there’s this one tepee sort of half throwed up against a couple of trees—more like a improvised lean-to is what you’d call it—and there’s this buck-board setting near it. With that there wardrobe trunk still on it, yes’m. But what I mean, all the old men are doing, they’re loafing around like somebody told ‘em they had to wait on something for a spell, while over by the lean-to—well, there was this one squaw, real purty young wench too, jest getting herself all stripped down bare-titted and crawling inside. So it’s only the other sixteen who’s deployed out behind them boulders keeping a bead on us, and—”

“It’s only—” Hoke cut the man off without intending to, the exclamation voicing itself. And then he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Sixteen?” he asked hesitantly. “You mean counting the one in the lean-to, nacherly. You don’t mean the sum total of them squaws is—”

“Jest what I said. Sixteen and one, which if’n you know how to add better’n you know how to git dressed, comes out to—”

But Hoke had already stopped listening. He had closed his eyes also. “Seventeen?” he moaned. “Seventeen?” Finally he faced it again, not able not to. “But jest tell me slow,” he said. “Down amongst the old men, you dint maybe notice one of them chewing on a nice appetizing boiled wood rat, sort offer nourishment betwixt meals? Or if’n he ain’t hungry at the moment, then doubtless he’s still wearing a expensive derby hat anyways, and—”

“Well, yair, come to think on it I did see one with a derby, but what is—”

“Nothing,” Hoke said. “Nothing at all.” His eyes were shut again, and his head was lowered. “Excepting it’ll be at least twenty hours now, or anyways that’s what it took him the last time when they was camped up to Fronteras, and I don’t reckon there’s gonter be none of them let us cut it no shorter neither, not until they all durned sure git their belly-buttons squished out, so—”

But he was not being understood, evidently. Or perhaps he had mumbled even more than he realized, slumped against a rock and not even caring, not for the moment.
“Dean Goose?”
he heard Belle shouting at him. And then she was shaking him once more too. “Because he’s the greatest
what? Who?
Now what the blazes kind of word is—”

But this time he didn’t answer at all, already banging his head against the boulder behind him where he sat, quite hard, although quite deliberately also, in that profoundly impotent, ponderous rhythm of absolute and unmitigable frustration, of futility beyond hope. They had to restrain him physically.

And he was right, because it was to be the twenty hours indeed, give or take an apparent meal or two, and by then Captain Fiedler and his troopers would be long departed for Yerkey’s Hole. But there would be another problem then too. Because it had been approximately six o’clock in the morning when it commenced, and at dusk, at twilight, it was only the twelfth squaw who was emerging from the tepee, the thirteenth who was entering. So they knew it would be
under cover of darkness that it would cease. “Or when the damned thing just falls off him altogether,” Belle said.

So when (he next morning came and the Indians were furtively gone at that, and the buckboard at the same time, without there having been a single sound for Belle or Hoke to hear, without a trace now either, there was only one boon, one saving grace. There still remained only the one direction for him to have taken with his burden. At the crack of dawn, and with the further benison of well-rested horses, they were storming after him again.

“And I’m even almost glad,” Belle said. “I almost am. Because this time I’m gonter have less mercy than a aggravated rattlesnake. I ain’t even gonter kill him now, not right off. I’m jest gonter bury the little pee-drinker up to his neck Apache-style and prop his mouth open with a stick and let the ants do it. As a matter of fact I’ll sell tickets.”

Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.

They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”

Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge

the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”

They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”

So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:

“Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”

“And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”

“Yet it frightens me at times, the extent of our obsession. Why, even that young girl these people are following, would you believe that even she reminded me of him slightly?”

“Oh, but by now he must be far too manly to resemble any young lady
—
”

“Of course, it was only illusion. But I’ve longed for him so deeply, so deeply
—
”

“I too, I too!”

“Well, shall we move on, Miss Youngblood?”

“Let’s, Miss Grimshaw.”

Hoke strolled back to the surrey.

Three hours later it happened. Afterward, Hoke would find it difficult to remember how, since he was never aware of the exact point at which logic ceased and the other, the intuitive, took hold.

Because he had been squinting ahead at the abandoned farmhouse for some time before it did. They were going fast also, passing only the first of the once-cultivated fields in fact, and there were no signs at all, nothing to indicate that Dingus had even taken this same road, let alone might have stopped. Yet suddenly Hoke knew, felt it even before realizing that he felt anything at all, because his left hand had already lifted involuntarily to obstruct Belle’s right, staying the whip. “Hang it,” she demanded, “now what the—?”

And then it must have been in his face too, the same certainty, although he still could not have explained, nor did he even glance toward her. But somehow there was contagion in it, in his posture alone perhaps, because Belle slowed the team at once. The house itself was roughly a hundred yards off the road, the gutted barn beyond that, and they were only now abreast of both. “What?” she whispered. “Do you see—?”

They went another thirty or forty yards before they stopped completely, and after that several moments elapsed in which neither of them moved, in which only the horses snorted and heaved in their traces. Belle was clutching her shotgun. A single jay swooped by in the heat, in the hot bright calm afternoon glare.

Then Hoke was running. And this too, this without question now was instinct, some queer spontaneous impulse beyond thought, because still he had not seen him yet at all—had bolted from the surrey and was sprinting across the eroded ancient plowditches and had actually covered one third of the distance to the house before he did, before Dingus appeared. Dingus still wore the red dress, although without the bonnet now, without the pillow as well. He had emerged leisurely, carrying a shovel, strolling toward the barn.

And then perhaps Hoke was thinking again at last, had begun to think, to remember, the lost money, rewards gained and stolen and re-established and lost again, frustration that seeped to the deepest marrow of his bones, the aggregate affront to his soul itself. Perhaps he was, because he told
himself, “Yair, but he’s kilt now, at last he’s kilt and I kin get some peace.” But there remained something scarcely rational about him at the same time, even then, since he did not shoot but merely continued to run, if not quite without reason then recklessly at the very least since the furrowed earth had begun to give beneath his boots now, was crumbling with every stride so that he slipped and flailed and almost fell more than once. But he was lucky too. Dingus himself had still failed to notice him, still strolled there casually.