Ho, sheriff, about time yu got over here, greets the bank teller, pocketing his wire-framed spectacles and adjusting his sleeve garters. Whut with all’s been goin on, I aint had no one t’spell me, and I’m sorely pinin fer a quick snort. So how about yu jest take over here at the winder a minnit whilst me’n the deppity go wet the whistle?
But I dont know nuthin about bankin.
Hell, me neither, sheriff. Fuckin mystery is whut it is.
His deputy lays a cold bony arm around his shoulder and, his breath smelling like rotten leather, whispers raspily in his ear: Watch out fer them gold nuggets in thet vault over thar, sheriff. Then he and the teller leave him, heads ducked and laughing bitterly, and he goes over to check the vault: no nuggets, nothing in there but rat turds and a few sick flies. He tries, just the same, to close the heavy steel door, but it falls off its hinges, slamming the wooden floor with a thunderous kerwhump! It just misses the toes of his new boots and sends paper money fluttering into the air like chickens trying to take off, or like dead leaves stirred up by a sudden blow, a memory from some forgotten time of trees, of whole forests of them, back before he entered on the desert.
He peels off his white kid gloves to give his hands some air and then, for lack of any larger inspiration, he tucks the cigarillo in the corner of his mouth (he recalls now that the deputy, before leaving him, stuck his own half-smoked butt into his lips like a kind of advance on his wages and then, grinning a crooked grin, snapped a long bony finger at his badge, sending a sharp pain through him like a sudden toothache in the breast) and sets about sweeping the scattered money into a corner with a broom. The building, though hot and airless, has a dank underground smell that spooks him, as does that dead kid hanging there, one shoulder hitched up over his head by the hook, the other hanging limp below his gapping chin, which has been half shot away. It’s so uncomfortable-looking, it makes him feel all pent up, and he regrets that this sheriffing business, which he perceives will take some getting used to, hinders him from just going off on a bust and getting wholesomely tanked and then shooting things up and stomping a lot of people until he can calm down. He recollects something a lawman once told him — or it might have been some outlaw he partnered up with for a time: Lawr’n order, son, he said, is a lot like shittin reglar: mostly makes the day run smoother, but folks need a violent dose a the trots now’n then jest not t’git all stoppered up’n lose their fightin edge.
While he’s meditating on the shit side of the law and how it might play out in his new career, the barroom chanteuse with the orange curls and ruby-studded cheek comes in with four or five men masked in neckerchiefs and walks up to his grille at the counter.
Though she looks like she’s probably up to no good, he tells her howdy in a sociable way and asks her if she wants to make a deposit.
No, but I’d be mighty grateful ifn yu would, sheriff, she says back with a wink, digging at herself between her legs with her left hand while pointing a pistol at him with her right. Actually, darlin, it’s a holdup.
Well, he sighs, I should oughter arrest yu all, but they aint nuthin wuth stealin. The gold nuggets is already gone.
I know, sheriff, we stole them some while back. Whut we come fer t’day is thet silver badge yu’re sportin.
No, caint let yu have thet.
Now yu aint sayin yu wanta die fer thet dang tin star!
Nope. But I aint givin it up neither.
Now aint thet feller fulla beans!
Lissen at him blowin smoke!
I think I reckanize the sumbitch, Belle, says one of her fellow desperadoes, a one-eyed graybeard with a lumpy nose, best he can tell behind the bandanna. Thet thar’s the dude whut done in Big Daddy.
Yu dont say!
Hell, lets jest whup his weedy butt and take thet star, Belle!
Yeah, and all them fancy duds t’boot!
I could strictly use me a blade like thet!
Now jest git a grip on yer dicks, boys! Dont wanta mess with the sheriff when he’s all hotted up like this. Yu seen whut he kin do when his dander’s up. The chanteuse hitches one breast as though repocketing it in its cup and gives his golden buckskin breeches a slow affectionate study, then peers up at him and winks dreamily, scratching her crotch with her pistol barrel. Best we rob sumthin else.
Aw shit, aint all thet much here, Belle, whines a runty pop-eyed bandit with ears tattooed like spiderwebs. Most everthin’s tuck whut’s wuth takin.
Well, says the chanteuse languidly, and the pistol goes off between her thighs, sending a bullet ricocheting around the hollow bank lobby like a hornet on a tear — he ducks as it whines past, and it caroms hollowly off the steel doorframe of the vault, then exits through a window, where, outside in the noonday sun, a yelp is heard, though whether animal or human, hard to tell. When he raises his head, his own six-shooters drawn, he notices there’s a hole in the chanteuse’s skirts he can see clean through like a peephole into nothing, and there are only two or three men in here now where before there were more. She licks her smoking gun barrel suggestively, and says: They’s thet boy hangin thar. I reckon we could steal him. Thet awright, sheriff honey?
The boy? He’s kinder sorta dead.
I know. Little peckerwood warnt wuth cowpie when he wuz kickin, but in his present condition he’s got some doobobs we can sell. Or eat.
How about it, sheriff? demands a masked fat man wearing batwing chaps and a soft tattered vest, split from armpit to hem. We gotta shoot it out or whut?
He stares through the grille at the chanteuse and her disreputable gang, weary of this exchange and wondering if maybe he ought to take up some other trade altogether, like prospecting or cattle rustling. Or maybe just throw in with the chanteuse and her warm powdered bosom; who’s he to right wrongs and punish evil? His gaze is drawn into the hole in her skirts as toward a far hazed horizon which he knows to be both a promise and the absence of all promise, and so a terrible and fatal lure, and it brings to mind something else that steely-eyed sheep rancher said, or maybe it was the dying cowboy: They aint nuthin wuth dyin fer out here, pard, he said, cept choosin yer own dyin, and dyin fer it aint choosin it neither. Inbetwixt times, yu jest keep on adventurin on accounta the generalized human restlessness and cuz the end of whutall else is emptiness and the end of adventurin is emptiness too. He pulls his attention up out of the hole and out of his doleful cogitations, which have taken a spell, though no one seems to mind. Well the boy aint like proppity, he sighs, this decision having come to him, somewhat like the town did, rather than he to it. He holsters his pistols, flicks the butt away. Do whut yu damn please. And, taking up his rifle, he leaves the thieves to their drear pickings and steps out into the sudden desert night.
The first thing he sees as his eyes adjust to the moonless dark is the hanged man twisting melancholically on his rope. His fancy eastern duds are gone, probably stolen; he’s naked except for weathered cowhide chaps, old busted-up boots, and a round felt hat, which cozies his head down to his nose. He looks like he’s chewing a dead cigar with his ghostly butt and drooling tobacco juice from it; probably a roll of paper money shoved up there and set alight in respect of some juridical tradition from these parts; his mouth’s stuffed with it too, in and around the erected tongue. The creaking of the gallows rope, a distant howl, and his own footsteps in the grit of the empty street are the only sounds to be heard.
In the dim starlight, that grit glows pallidly all the way to the encircling horizon, the town’s shabby structures negatively silhouetted against it, or else blackly lost in the black sky, discernible only where they blot out the stars. The hanging banker’s his lone companion out here: all’s shut down, even the bank, back there somewhere in the night behind him. The saloon, too, of course, no use looking in there, he knows what he’d find. He should have asked his deputy where the jail was; he could have spent the night in it. Assuming the night’s his for spending in a place like this.