It dont make a damn t’me, says another, without looking up from under the wide floppy hat brim that covers his lowered face, lest I kin neither eat it nor fuck it.
Dont look much good fer one’r tother. Lest mebbe it’s one a them transvested pussies.
Y’reckon? Little shitass dont look very beardy at thet.
C’mere, kid. Bend over’n show us yer credentials.
Ifn they aint been down outa thet saddle in a spell, I misdoubt I wishta witness em.
The men hoot damply and expectorate some more. Whut’s yer game, kid? the one under the floppy hat asks into the fire, his voice gravelly and hollow like one erupting from a fissure in the earth deep below him. Whuddayu doin out here?
Nuthin. Jest passin through.
That also seems to amuse them all for some reason. Lordy lordy! Jest passin through!
Ifn thet dont beat all!
A one-eyed mestizo in a rag blanket lifts a buttock and farts fulminously. Sorry, boys. Thet one wuz jest passin through.
Just as well to keep moving on, he figures, and to that purpose he gives his mustang a dig in the flanks, but the horse drops its head in solemn abjuration, inclined, it seems, to go no further.
So whar yu passin through to, kid? asks a wizened graybeard in filthy striped pants, red undershirt, and a rumpled derby. Next to him, the man in the floppy hat is deftly rolling shredded tobacco into a thin yellow leaf between knotty fingers.
Thet town over thar. His rifle is off the saddle horn now and resting on his thighs.
Yu dont say.
Wastin yer time, boy. Nuthin over thar.
Then nuthin’ll hafta do.
Yu’ll never git thar, kid.
Aint nuthin but a ghost town.
I’ll git thar.
Hunh!
Ifn they’s any gittin to be done, son, says the graybeard in red skivvies and derby, I’d advise yu t’rattle yer hocks outa the Terror-tory and trot em back home agin. Pronto.
Caint do thet.
No? Floppy hat licks the tobacco leaf, presses it down. Why not, kid? Whar yu from?
Nowhars.
Nobody’s from nowhars. Who’s yer people?
Aint got none.
Everbody’s got people.
I aint.
Thet’s downright worrisome. The man tucks the thin yellow tube away under the overhanging hat brim at the same time that a tall ugly gent in a flat-crowned cap, much punctured, and with stiff tangled hair spidering down to his hairy shirt, stuffs a fresh chaw into his jaws and asks him what’s his mustang’s name.
Thet’s it.
Whut’s it?
Mustang.
Shit, thet aint nuthin of a name. He spits a gob against the tin pot to fry it there.
Dont need no other.
Dont fuck with me, son. Hoss must have a proper name.
Ifn he does, he never tole it to me.
Thet boy’s a real smartass, aint he?
Either him or the hoss is.
Tell me, kid, says floppy hat, holding an unstruck match out in front of his fresh-made cigarillo. And I dont want no shit. Dont keer fuck-all about the damn hoss. But whut’s yer name?
Caint rightly say. Whut’s yers?
We call him Daddy Dunne, says a grizzled hunchback with greasy handlebars sloping to his clavicle like a line drawing of the shadowy deformity behind his ears. On accounta he dont do no more. And they all laugh bitterly again, all except the man under discussion, who is lighting up.
So why dont yu git down off thet mizzerbul critter’n come set with us a spell, says the one-eyed mestizo, unsmiling.
He watches them without expression, knowing what must come next, even while not knowing where that knowing has come from.
Y’know, says a scrawny skew-jawed wretch, pulling on his warty nose, thet young feller dont seem over friendly.
Looks like he’s plumb stuck on thet dang animule.
Looks like he’s hitched to it.
Lissen, boy. I ast yu a question, floppy hat says, straightening up ever so slightly, so the glowing tip of his cigarillo can be seen in the voided dark beneath the broad brim, both hands braced like talons on his knees.
The rider shifts his seat for balance, his finger edging up the rifle stock toward the trigger, and in the fallen hush the saddle creaks audibly like a door suddenly opening under him. And I done answered it, ole man, he says.
Nobody moves. There is a long direful stillness during which a wolf howls somewhere and stars fall in a scatter, streaking across the domed dark like flicked butts. Then that dies out, too, and everything stops. It goes on so long, this star-stunned silence, it starts to feel like it won’t ever not go on. As if time had quit on them and turned them all to stone. The rider, the horse under him gone rigid and cold, feels his own heart winding down. Only his hands have any action left in them. He uses them, struggling against the torpor that fetters him, to raise his rifle barrel and shoot the man in the floppy hat. The impact explodes into the man’s chest and his hat flies off and his mouth lets go the cigarillo and he pitches backwards onto the desert floor. With that, things ease up somewhat, the mustang snorting and shifting under him, the skies awhirl once more, the others watching him warily but returned to an animate state, more or less. Chewing. Spitting.
Yu shouldna done thet, kid, grumbles the ugly man with the spidery hair.
He rests the rifle back on his thighs again. Warnt my fault. He shoulda drawed.
Shit, sumbitch warnt even armed.
He’s blind, kid. Stark starin.
Wuz.
The man he’s shot lies arms asprawl on the desert floor, staring up at the night sky with eyes, he sees, as white as moons.
Yu shot an ole unarmed blind man, son. Whuddayu got t’say fer yerself?
He walks his horse over to the dead man, bends down from the saddle, and picks up the fallen cigarillo. Not a bandit, as he’d supposed, after all. Wearing a sheriff’s badge, the star pierced by his rifle shot and black with blood. Probably he should shoot them all. Maybe they expect him to. Instead, he tucks the half-spent cigarillo between his cracked lips, sucks on it to recover the glow, and, without a backward glance, quits their wearisome company and slowly rides away.
It is high noon, and the main street of the vaporous town which has been so long eluding him now rolls up under his mustang’s plodding hoofs as though in abrupt repair of some mechanical disorder. The street, with its dilapidated gray frame buildings squared off against the boundless desolation, is empty and silent and yet full of dimly heard echoes, a remote disturbance of mumbling voices, swept into town perhaps by the hot desert wind. A saloon sign creaks desultorily in this talking wind, frayed strands of hitching-rail rope turn idly, a lace curtain flutters in an open window. Particles of dust gather into airy spirals that dance in the street like hanged men with their arms tied behind them and as soon dissolve and then as soon regather to wind about again.
He dismounts and leads his horse past an old buckboard with a broken wheel to the water trough. Nothing but a dry dust bed in its tin hollow. At one end by a bowed porch column he finds a well pump with a rusty handle, gives it a crank. No resistance. Like wagging a dead man’s bones. Under the saloon sign overhead, a small board hangs by knotted cords with the word ROOMS on it, though it’s the crudely lettered COLD BEER notice tacked up over the doorway that most gets his attention. Rifle in hand, he steps through the swinging doors into the saloon’s dense murk, ready for whatever, but whatever doesn’t happen. The place is dark and empty, hotter inside than out. There’s a scatter of tipped chairs and tables, broken lamps, a few empty dust-caked bottles lying about, but nothing with which to tickle the throat. An old grand piano, one of its legs caved in, sits on its haunches in one corner, baring its wide grinning row of yellowing teeth, its broken wires sprouting wildly like hair standing on end. A cobwebbed staircase leads up to the dim suggestion of the advertised rooms. No promise there, and that low muttering hum is worse in here, the way the wind is blowing through the shattered windows maybe, so he strolls back out into the glare, sand crunching under his boots on the board floors.