Smonk’s good eye narrowed. I remember that little sneak, he said. Ike caught him, all right. Done stole my mule. Knucklehead’s got sand.
Where is he?
Hell if I know.
McKissick had been backing toward the log and when he was close enough he dove over it and, airborne, kicked the stock so the over & under flipped and he landed on his back behind the log and caught the gun. He’d swallowed the eye again, this time on purpose. He raised up to fire but Smonk was gone, except for his voice, which boomed in the high treetops and dropped acorns and seemed to shake the sand.
GIVE ME BACK MY FUCKING EYE!
“Give me back my fucking eye”? the blacksmith repeated down to his mule. He gazed into the dark trees. Did you hear that?
The animal didn’t answer.
The woods were soundless and still, a picture of woods with him sitting in the middle of it.
Well, shit my britches, he said, looking upward where dapples of blue highlit the leaves. He was poking the mule’s ribs with his heels. Why don’t we get the hell out of here.
He goaded the mule to a run in the direction of the tenant farm. If devilry were going on, if Smonk was out in the woods killing McKissick and saying such a string of words a Christian ought never hear, Gates could sneak back and see the whore for a quick suck and a spot of licker to sustain him on the long ride to come. He could charge it to the judge.
Yah! he said, kicking the mule harder.
McKissick peered over the log.
He’s done for, the bailiff thought. Or I’d be dead already.
He stood up. He scanned the spaces between the trees. He saw a sparrow. He saw a chipmunk. A butterfly blinking past.
The sniper’s shot he half-expected never came.
So Smonk was gone. His eye, however, was working its way down the bailiff’s gullet.
He strapped his loin cloth on and cinched its knot. If E.O. had indeed retreated, it showed weakness. Here was their chance. McKissick turned, he was running toward his horse. He’d circle back, get Gates, and the two of them would track Smonk and kill him once and for all.
Gates rolled off the mule at the farmhouse and reined it to the rail. He mounted the stairs, brandishing the empty Winchester like Daddy used to, when he hit Momma. He looked around, then knocked on the wall with the rifle-stock. He knocked again, then again, and finally creaked open the door. A slab of light fell into the room and the dark corners tensed. He stepped in from the sun and waited.
The mule brayed behind him.
Dry up, said the blacksmith. He lit a lamp and found a jar of yellow liquid on a shelf and sipped it but spat it back out. Piss, he said. I drunk piss! In a rage, he overturned chairs and kicked up the rug and stomped through floorboards and tore apart the stove. Not even a shot’s worth. That lying tenant farmer. Hell. By now Gates was so ready for a taste he’d of swallowed the jar of piss if it had been a drunk had pissed it. He walked onto the porch and glared down the hillside, nothing except more woods and sugarcane. Mule ’d got loose. Out in the field pulling up grass. Shit.
At the insistence of his bowels, he left the porch and picked his way through the weeds alongside the cabin. He saw the tenant farmer spread out on the ground, his throat cut. His face covered with ants. Serves ye right, Gates said, stepping over the body. He searched the man’s pockets and reclaimed the nail he’d given him earlier but found nothing else. Dusting ants from his hands, he walked a few yards farther, into a stand of oaks.
The whore stood up from a crouch and grinned. She was unhooking her slip from one shoulder and then the other. It fell from the skeleton and skin she was and she glowed white in a burst of sunlight where the forest roof hadn’t yet stitched out the sky. His bowels forgotten, Gates rushed toward her fumbling with his britches and she met him with her teeth bared and they fell coupling. She was a zestful lover who growled and scratched and bit, just the way he liked, and when he flipped her to her stomach and held her arms behind her back she groaned and took his wad which was all he wanted from any lady, whore or otherwise.
Half an hour later, making good time on the horse, McKissick with his balls bouncing on the saddle and his thighs blistered and his burns coated with sand rode harder yet and seemed to lift from the horse’s back. They skidded to a stop before the farmhouse, the mule chewing grass.
McKissick ran up the steps and through the open door, rifle at ready. The naked woman, tied to a chair, raised her head and bared her teeth and hissed, Did ye come back for more? She writhed against her ropes and flung her strings of hair about and, still bound, began to scoot toward him chair and all. I got some sugar for ye, she said and licked her tongue over her front teeth. Come here let me give ye a kiss.
He stepped back, onto the porch. I reckon I’ll pass, he said.
She spat at him and snapped her teeth, foam clinging to the corners of her mouth and her fingers clawing the seat of her chair. She writhed in her ropes and craned out her neck and in her fervor to bite him upset herself and crashed to the floor.
McKissick wiped sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand and cocked the over & under.
Now she was scootching toward him over the floorboards. He could see scabbed-over bite marks on her buttocks and legs and titties. A wide circumference of mouth, huge radius of teeth.
Smonk do extract a price, McKissick said. He raised the rifle and fired and the concussion rang in the room. She lay still with a trace of smoke rising from the hole in her forehead. Behind him the mule brayed and a dark cloud of crows blackened the sky. McKissick steadied himself against the wall. Dern. He bet she’d been a good ole girl in spite of it all and suddenly he missed his wife.
Meanwhile, Gates had crept up behind him, and before the bailiff could turn, his own partner had whacked him across the back of the head with a rifle butt. McKissick stumbled forward with blood hot like sunlight on his neck and fell across the whore.
10 THE MISSISSIPPI GAMBLER
THOUGH SHE HATED TO, EVAVANGELINE HAD FORSAKEN THE PONY with the star on its forehead since to reclaim it meant chancing upon the speckled man with the tore-up arm and the rifle. She wished the pony well, hoped it got out of the madman’s way.
Her head throbbed from being conked and from time to time her vision blurred, but she kept walking, trying to ignore the dogtooth marks on her elbow, leading Junior and the children away from the path and north through the tangled woods as fast as she could make their legs go, ducking briars and battling through a vicious crossfire of thistle and thorny weeds and sticker bushes, her skin redlined with cuts and clothes snagged to threads. Snake tails melted into the brush before her and twice whitetail deer rose on springs out of the bramble and bounded away as if the bushes were air. She shivered.
Presently they happened upon some luck, a dry creekbed curving through the bottom of a gully, and they began to follow it, the going easier through the sand and pebbles. She stopped in the lowest, shadiest place she could find and dug into the bottom for water but found only more sand. Walking a few yards behind her, the children held hands in a line, quiet and obedient, with Junior bringing up the rear, slicing at green snakes with his Mississippi Gambler.
Late in the afternoon there was light up the hillside on the left and they ascended the incline using vines and at the top the eight of them peered out at a field of sugarcane with another field after it and field upon field as far as any of their eyes could see. Evavangeline was about to push through out of the woods when Junior tugged her sleeve.
Miss Whore? he said. You don’t want to go this a way. That goes where I jest come from. Old Texas. It’s a bad place.