McKissick and Smonk had met in Utah in the sheep town of Hornwall Bend, where Smonk was hiding out and McKissick was in jail waiting to hang. While E.O. had been laying with some man’s wife, her husband and his friends had arrived home unexpectedly. Ike, the nigger Smonk traveled with, crowned the husband with a shotgun but another fellow got the drop on Ike and they arrested him and pronounced him guilty without a trial and had him scheduled to hang in the near future. Smonk got away Scot free and mounted sugar bags on a horse he’d stolen from a town fifty miles away. He fired a pistol and scared the horse off, it running in the direction home, the weight bouncing on its back exactly Smonk’s. From beneath the whorehouse, he watched most of the town’s men ride off in a posse, leaving an inexperienced deputy to guard the prisoners.
Thus McKissick, jailed for murder (banker, strangled), sat in the cell beside Ike and yelled it wasn’t fair for a white man to be caged up with a coon. Get this watermelon out of here. Ike never said anything. Just sat with his arms folded and eyes closed.
Hey, McKissick called.
At midnight there came a scuffle from the front office where the deputy was sleeping. Ike sat up from his bunk and began lacing his shoes.
What the hell, McKissick wanted to know.
Then, lit by the lantern he held, in walked the strangest fellow you’d ever see. He looked like an orangutan McKissick had seen at a zoo once. Smonk told Ike there were no keys to be had, the sheriff had taken them. Under his arm he had a big shield of iron that he handed through the bars to Ike. Ike propped the plate up against his bunk and got behind it. Smonk—he hadn’t acknowledged the other prisoner—was lighting a stick of dynamite.
Panic flickered over McKissick’s face as Smonk stood the stick against the east wall and walked out of the room.
Ike said, Come on.
McKissick dove behind the iron shield as the TNT exploded and when he looked out the town newly revealed gleamed with rain.
To follow were years of robberies, blackmail schemes, McKissick and Smonk meeting in a city and making their money and fading in different directions and communicating via secret code in newspaper advertisements. (McKissick never again saw Ike during their transactions. For all he knew, in those years and in these, the nigger was gone.) Their partnership would dissolve every year or two because McKissick was the guilty sort, and each time an innocent was murdered in crossfire or blown to bits in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would give up his guns and go straight. He’d disappear.
Smonk always found him.
One time he found him and McKissick had got married. Lived in a brick house in Carter Wyoming, happy the first time in his life. She was a reformed whore who would still use her whore tricks on him and did each night…until the dawn McKissick walked out naked on his porch to piss and saw Smonk sleeping there, a bottle for a pillow. Soon as his wife saw Smonk it started. It always did. Smonk got all the girls, they couldn’t resist him. It was something of the animal about him, was McKissick’s notion, a wild element men had left behind with the advent of such peacekeeping creations as the six-shooter or Gatling gun.
McKissick helped Smonk extort several thousand dollars from a mayor who was a secret octoroon in a nearby town. Later, after he caught Smonk in his, McKissick’s, bedroom, with his, McKissick’s, wife, McKissick took the girl and fled. They both pretended the baby was McKissick’s, and hell, maybe he was. They lived in Oklahoma in poverty and the boy grew up skinny and by the time Smonk found them again McKissick was lean himself, short of fuse, unable to find work, happy to extort or threaten or burn or kill.
It’s a tobaccy farmer, Smonk had said, pushing gold coins across the table, the boy hiding beneath. E.O. had lost his eye by now, lost his looks. He’d gotten fatter. Hairier. Brown spots on his skin. Chancre sores. But he was short none of the appeal he had for women. In these lean years McKissick’s wife had stopped performing her wifely duties with McKissick, but here she was flirting with Smonk, and here was Smonk paying gold coin after gold coin to McKissick so he’d go outside and tend the one-eye’s horse while he visited with the woman. McKissick kicked the dog across the yard on his way to the barn.
McKissick murdered the tobacco farmer and when he came back his wife was gone, took off after Smonk. So with the boy in tow McKissick had chased them. He found his wife in a town in east Texas, whoring, but she refused to take him back and he shot her dead and with the boy behind him on his horse he rode off after Smonk. They’d chased E.O. all over the world it felt like, for years, winding up at last in the wilderness between the rivers. He’d installed himself as bailiff in the nearest town (Old Texas) and clipped his chin whiskers and cut his hair. He’d donned the overalls and bicycle cap of a town bumpkin and waited in disguise.
Now, naked, he thumped the eye in the air and caught it and popped it in his mouth. Its taste growing on him.
He turned to go and there stood E.O. Leaning against a tree. He had his cane in one hand and a pistol in the other. Somehow he looked even worse than he had the day before, coughing, dragging one leg as he came forward, blood oozing into his beard. McKissick stepped back, closing his hands. For the first time since he’d known the one-eye, Smonk looked killable. Like murdering him would do him a favor. McKissick was backing up, aware he was naked, his loin cloth draped over a branch near where he’d defecated.
That’s yer stob? Smonk pointed his cane. No wonder that whore of yern used to fret so on mine.
McKissick’s rifle lay across the log.
Smonk stepped closer. He wore an eyepatch but had it flipped up so you could see in the hole. The bailiff remembered Smonk telling the story of how, after he lost the eye, its attachments had rotted in his head and for dern near a year he’d had to stuff garlic in the hole to make it bearable and keep the gnats and flies away.
I recollect ye now, fellow, Smonk said. Here we are ain’t we. A reunion in the woods.
McKissick kept backing up and Smonk paced him step for step. He was like a grizzly about to stand.
I want my rifle yonder, Smonk repeated. And I want my fucking eye.
McKissick edged to his right, toward Smonk’s blind side, but the one-eye angled his head and wagged his finger at such a squarehead move.
McKissick, Smonk said, ye got nerve, boy. I’ll give ye that. To come after me when you know what I’ll do to ye.
It was cause of my boy.
Ye boy.
William Junior. Willie. He was at the trial when ye butchered the town. When I come to he was gone and I knew you must of took him.