Well, demanded Justice of the Peace Tate. Speak up, Lurleen.
He ain’t done nothing I didn’t let him, she mumbled.
Good evening, bitches, Smonk said.
Gates had awakened a few days after that, perhaps not as sound as he’d once been but alive, and then, a week later, Lurleen Gates had come home claiming Smonk had kidnapped her. She said she’d only gone out in the dark because she didn’t want the other ladies to hear the tongue-lashing she meant to put on old Smonk. Said she was sparing the town. Said Smonk did unmentionable things to her and made her lie. Said if the men of the town didn’t go get him and put his life on trial they were a bunch of lily-livered sad sacks.
Now the blacksmith heard shots from Smonk’s house and hurried to the bay door with the Winchester, stopping to untie the horse and mule for a quick escape. He was glad not to be involved in the actual killing of Smonk because everybody knew killing Smonk would be dern near impossible. He hoped McKissick was up to it. Hell, he’d rather buy Smonk a drink of licker than kill him. Smonk always had good licker. Or maybe Smonk and McKissick would kill one another and Gates could take them both back and be heralded a hero in Old Texas instead of a cuckolded fool. He hunkered down with the rifle and waited. Or dern. Maybe he wouldn’t go back at all.
Smonk didn’t like the stars. He didn’t trust them. It felt like they were watching him from higher ground and cover of dark. In years past he’d insisted on rigging a tarp over Ike’s wagon before he could sleep. The tarp made Ike tense and closed-in, and he finally put Smonk out and told him to sleep under the wagon. This had worked and now, as if they were brothers in bunk beds, they talked each night.
I had a dream, Smonk said tonight.
Don’t tell ye dreams, said Ike.
They lay listening to bugs.
Tell me about that shark’s tooth, Smonk said.
I fount it on the beach when I was a youngun, Ike said. On a giant pile of oyster shells. I couldn’t even close my hand around it it was so big. I showed it to my daddy and he quit drinking long enough to be amazed. He was a drunk and a fisherman. He said it was a great white’s tooth. Then he passed out.
In the morning I took the tooth and showed it around. My little buddies. One of em had this magnifying glass I’d always wanted. It would start fires. When he saw the shark tooth he offered a trade.
Then Daddy woke up and started looking for it. Looked ever where. He come fount me and said where the heck was it and I said traded and he went to whaling on me with a ax handle.
Smonk ashed his cigar. He turned his jug up. He had burlap bags nailed to the sides of the wagon to keep out the starlight and his rifle lay cleaned and oiled alongside him in its sock. He didn’t use a bedroll, the ground better for his hips.
He’d just rolled over onto his back when, beneath him, as if such a phenomenon were natural and nightly, the ground shook, almost gently, whispering the grass and rocking the stones and squeaking the wagon hinges. Leaves in nearby trees shuddered though the wind had faded with dusk and the bugs went dead and for a moment the night held its breath. Then a great clack of thunder and several after-clacks rumbled the south, behind them.
Adios, plantation, Smonk muttered.
Reckon ye got him? Ike asked.
McKissick? Smonk blew a ray of smoke. Naw. That one’s slick. His only failure is he bucks his own nature. He’ll come at us tomorrow.
You want me—
Naw. Jest go on finish ye story.
Well, me and my daddy never had no easy time with the other. He was a mean drunk that was drunk all the time and I couldn’t do nothing to please him. Nothing but leave. Which I done at the age of seven or eight. Went off and grew up to be a decent young church-going Negro. Didn’t mind my lot which seemed like it was gone be picking cane. Anyway I had a aunt would write me letters and give me the family news. I never answered em but they’d find me here and there. One of em turned up in Alabama where I’d married a gal and we was fixing to start us a family. That was the letter that said Daddy was finally dying of the cancer.
Telegram, warn’t it?
It was. I didn’t know it was such a thing. The wagon creaked as Ike shifted his weight. The bugs were at it again.
I killed three horses and rurned another one getting up to St. Louis, Ike went on. And when I did I made a beeline to see Daddy straight away. Hadn’t laid eyes on him in twenty-two years. I remember he was in the back room at the doctor’s house. He didn’t even know me at first. Had a hole eat out of his neck. Weighted about seventy pounds. I took off my hat and said who I was and he said come closer. When I leaned in to hear, he said, I still can’t believe you traded that got-dern shark tooth.
Smonk began to cough and coughed for a long time.
When he finished, the bugs had gone quiet again.
It was the river, Smonk said. That I dreamed of. It was up in the tree branches it was so high.
Go to sleep, said Ike.
In Smonk’s house McKissick was kicking through doors and belly-crawling down halls. Where the hell was E.O.? He’d fired dozens of times, at threatening lamps and figurines and at his own gaping reflection in windows and mirror-glasses. He’d found a room with twenty-five Model ’94 thirty-thirty rifles racked on the walls, drawers of pistols and stacks of ammunition.
But no E.O.
He smelled something burning and, reloading, hurried through the hall peppered with his own bullets and down the curving staircase. In a low corner of the kitchen, smoke was leaking from a small door he hadn’t yet seen, an aperture so squat it seemed designed for a child or dwarf. There was a string going under the door and he saw the string had been tight at one point, tripped no doubt by his own foot. He approached the door and tapped the planks with his pistol barrel, smoke seeping from the top of the door and through its knotholes and slits. He touched the hot wood with his knuckle and used his pistol barrel to unfasten the rawhide thong. When the door swung open a cloud of smoke belched out. He fanned his face and coughed, crying from heat, and bent to peer below the smoke, down the earthen steps, where in the hazy gloom lay piles of gunpowder bags and sticks of TNT in boxes and crates of nitroglycerine vials, some already on fire.
Shit, he said.
He fell backward over a chair and scrambled through the door. He crossed his forearms before his head and crashed through Smonk’s picture window and shutters and rolled over the porch with wood dander and splinters of glass in his hair. Clinging to his pistol, he slid over broken panes and off the porch and landed running as the arsenal in Smonk’s root cellar began its explosions, shaking the ground and the tops of trees and catapulting the porch columns over the weeds. The house disintegrating in all directions in blinding flame and glass and screaming nails and the iron dome rising in the air.
McKissick landed on his side near the cobblestone road and rolled as a sink buried itself in the grass by his head. Burning furniture splintered on the ground and a mattress bounced and the dome landed upside down on the corn crib and settled in the fire like an enormous iron helmet cast down by some firegod of old. McKissick looked behind him where a cedar had burst into flames and then the next caught and the next and next like matchheads down the line.
He rolled in the grass, barely missed by a sideboard landing in splinters and the bottles of liquor inside casting currents of blue flame in every direction. He scrabbled away batting fire from his arms and legs. He looked mutely for the horse or his partner as stars landed around him. He was deaf. The back of his neck was blistered. He smelled burning hair. When he whistled for the horse smoke came out. The mule trotted past Smonk’s well, and the bailiff saw a lovely burning shingle flapping down toward the animal’s back, where the fireworks he’d bought in Old Texas sat in a bundle on top of their supplies.