The judge took his monocle off and polished it with his handkerchief. His eye looked small and weak without it, a puddle drying up. Well, he said, if you’ll permit me, this next part’s why I’m a goddamn circuit judge and you only a bailiff. See, what none of yall folks know out here in the wilderness between the rivers is that I’m a man of principle like none you’ve met. When I learned of this Smonk’s existence, at great personal expense I sought him out to discern and divine his motives. With only the good of my constituents in mind and of course the interest of science and theology as well.
The meeting had occurred a week before, the judge remembered, down south in Mobile, where he’d met Smonk for supper in a dive overlooking the bay. Smonk had brought a big ball-headed nigger and a chink whore in with him and several people got up and left the room.
I don’t usually eat with niggers, the judge had said, his black coat folded over his arm. Chinks neither.
Smonk bumped the table sliding in. We don’t usually eat with judges.
They’d had shrimp, which the judge despised. Bugs were what they looked like to him. He’d enjoyed the broiled potatoes, however, and speared them with his fork and added salt and chewed slowly as Smonk gobbled his shrimp—legs and shell and back veins in his beard—and rambled about the bridges he’d blown up in the War with the Spanish. How crucial the placement of the charge. How perfect the timing need be. How you always get your pay in advance. The ball-headed nigger never said a word, just ate quietly and with perfect manners which offended the judge. They were in a corner booth overlooking the water and shaded by a shutter propped open with a pool cue. Every door in the dive had a horseshoe nailed over it with the ends up.
His shoulders to the wall, Smonk smoked one cigar after another and ate a raw onion like an apple and had fits of coughing that shook the table. Once, he spilled a cup of salt then scooped a few grains and flicked them behind him. The judge had heard Smonk never left a building by any door except the one he’d entered. That he wouldn’t touch a toadfrog. Wouldn’t begin a trip on Sunday or bring anything black aboard a boat. Wouldn’t carry a hoe, ax or shovel into a house. That he never stepped over a fishing pole or under a ladder. Never swept beneath a bed or sang before breakfast or watched the full moon through green leaves. He made a point of getting his hair wet in the first May rain shower and believed that to take the rings off your finger would bring heart trouble and that a mouse-hole gnawed in your floor had to be patched by someone other than yourself. He believed it was bad luck to take cats into a new house. He believed that whatever you dreamed while sleeping beneath a new quilt would shortly come true, and that a dream of muddy water meant death.
His hands were abnormally large, though whether that was normal for his own peculiar brand of physiology or a symptom of one of his many ailments, the judge could only postulate. Smonk’s fingertops were hairy and his breath hot and acidic, hanging in the air like burnt skunk, occasioning the judge to chew with his handkerchief over his mouth. Smonk had positioned the whore under the table to rub his feet and once in a while he looked down and said something to her.
Oh, yah, she answered. Mista Smonk weal, weal hod. Weal, weal big. From under the table her hands appeared, a foot apart.
Trained her good, didn’t I? Smonk said grinning to the nigger but the nigger didn’t grin back or otherwise commit. Nor did he lower his eyes to the judge’s satisfaction when the judge stared at him, but this seemed a prudent time to set one’s sense of propriety aside for the greater good, so instead of having the impertinent fellow hanged, the judge had let it go for that day and turned to study Smonk’s features. In profile E.O.’s nose and mouth extended farther than your normal white Christian’s, an African feature which might locate some nigger in his past. And his eye, the one of use, was narrow, like a chink’s. Hell, wondered the judge, am I even dealing with a white man at all? Smonk had parched skin the color and texture of an ancient saddle and matted red hair tied at his neck, a cascade of beard graying down his chest but red around the lips like a consumptive’s. There’s your coughing. It was impossible to say how old he was. Might be fifty, might be eighty. Could of been handsome too in his young days, but now with nicks and sores and carbuncles and liver spots, et cetera, and that purple scar the size of a goddamn dirtdobber nest going up his neck behind his ear, well hell, it looked like any day could end his journey of years.
Smonk had sensed this inspection and for a moment locked his eye—as clairvoyant and intent as a wolf’s, gazing at snow with blood on it—with the judge’s.
The judge looked away.
You want ye shrimps, fellow? Smonk asked.
Naw. The judge swallowed. I don’t eat bugs.
Don’t eat bugs.
Weal, weal, weal hod.
Little more was said. After Smonk waited for the judge to pay, they’d walked down a narrow flight of stairs and through a back alley past mounds of rotting shellfish and along the tracks to the rail station where three men were loading a buckboard wagon. Smonk shooed them away and offered the judge the sum of five hundred dollars in a cigar box for a verdict against the town of Old Texas. The judge removed his monocle and took the box and placed it under his arm. Smonk put his cigar in his teeth and rolled back a green tarp in the wagon and what the judge beheld caused him to drop the box.
Is that a goddamn Gatling gun?
Hell naw, Smonk said. I got dirt on a general up in Washington. This here is Mister Hiram Maxim’s machine gun, the newest model. Makes a army Gat look like a goddamn flintlock.
Now, one week and one massacre later, the judge sat across from the bailiff and stuffed his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat and wished he had a rock of hard candy. From outside he heard a lady wailing.
Mic—Bailiff, he said, taking another swig, don’t trouble to thank me for my legal or scientific pursuits regarding Smonk. He rose and shut the window. On the sill outside was a parched white splat of birdshit. A monarch butterfly flittered down and landed there, then fluttered on. Thought the shit was a goddamn flower. The judge smiled. It’s been my pleasure and duty, he said, turning, to serve my fellow citizens, even unto the risk of my own life yea soul.
I ain’t a bailiff no more. Didn’t I say that?
The judge began to search his pockets ironically. Did ye file a letter of resignation in triplicate? If not yer still in the town’s employ and I can’t in good conscience accept a resignation now. In this current crisis. In other words, you the law.
What was they? asked the bailiff.
What was what.
Smonk’s motives. Which ye set out to discern and divine.
Ah. The judge looked up and to the left and composed his thoughts. Wretched, he said. There’s his motives, crystallized into one apt term. But what I’m trying to get at here is that with the justice of the peace et cetera et cetera murdered, the time’s done arrived to circumvent the natural course of law.
You ain’t got to go far to convince me, said the bailiff. Smonk kidnapped my youngun during his escape, if ye ain’t heard. Or killed him one. If you’d of asked me first off, I’d of told ye Smonk’s days is numbered fewer than the fingers on my hand and I’d of been gone.
Excellent. But ye gone need help. Man be a fool to take on E. O. Smonk without a goddamn army, jest about. I’m gone wire the governor post haste, but in the meantime is it anybody else left? Yall got to go after him now, this instant. Fore he disappears.