She watched with her mouth wide open and cried until she gagged. She gagged until she vomited. He heard her and began to claw himself toward her in the dirt. He was drooling. His lips cracked and bleeding. She vomited more until there was nothing left to vomit and all she could do was retch herself inside out and cry and see him crawling at her till he couldn’t crawl any more and then see him flapping his arms at her and baring his teeth, no pupil to be seen in the milky holes his eyes were.
In the morning he still wasn’t dead. She was cried plumb out and shivering, her face salt-raw and scaling. His belly jerking up and down. The flies had found him, all the flies there were, it seemed. She waited as he grew black with them until he’d twitch and they’d all lift and for a moment hover above him like a cloud before descending back. She watched. DIE! she would scream. She hated him. Why wouldn’t he just DIE? She wished she could go inside the shack and get his shotgun and shoot him in the head but she couldn’t move. She was rooted to this spot. She watched the slow tack of the world as the shadow of the roof inched toward her over the yard and then past her and she lay bathed in its cooler air and remembered a thousand things, all bad. She pissed where she lay and didn’t bat the flies. She slept at last deep in the night and was not surprised come dawn when his belly somehow still moved. She watched for hours hating the sun.
Now, in her cell in Old Texas, she wriggles to the backmost corner and grinds into the hay. Tries not to think of how at dusk, that day so long ago, Ned’s upper thighs wobbled and spread a little and a red cone emerged from a hole in his pants. She watched, not breathing. It was a fat possum, covered in blood. It wiggled its way out, then Ned’s stomach wiggled more and another fat, bloody possum rolled out and she understood that they had been inside him eating his guts. Suddenly a swirl of buzzards landed like an event of weather and the black hellish flesheaters stood swiveling their necks and hissing and looking at her with eyes soulless as bullet holes.
Let’s ride, men, Walton repeated.
He’ll shoot us, Loon answered, watching the trees.
Good heavens! I told you, there’s no gunman in the woods, Walton insisted. I’m afraid we’ve been “bluffed.” We’ve been shown leniency as well, I should imagine. That feral-looking “cuss” might have shot us all.
Bluffed? Onan said. By that old nigger in his wagon?
Negro. Yes. And didn’t, just moments ago, Ambrose take his leave as well? Was he shot? No.
The deputies looked at one another.
Who? Loon asked.
Walton stared at one then the other. Ambrose? Our former second-in-command?
That stumpy nigger, ye mean?
Negro, please.
Hell, I didn’t know he ranked me, Onan told Loon. I’d of been done killed him if I’d knew that.
Yeah, added Loon. We ain’t got to kill nobody.
Could we continue this discussion, Walton said, in transit? He swept back his hand to indicate the road.
What about that feller in the woods?
Walton clenched his fists. For the last time, there is no “feller” in the woods! It’s absurd to think that pointing would occasion murder. Look. He jabbed a finger at Onan, who yelled and covered his face with his hands.
Nothing happened.
See?
Onan lowered his hands. Then a shot cracked and the deputy flew backward out of his saddle.
Meanwhile, the children from the orphanage lay flat on their bellies with their hands over their ears, as William R. McKissick Junior had told them to, before he left. No matter what they heard, he’d said. He’d said witch ladies were about. If they saw a witch lady to run as far as they could and when they were far enough he told them to lay on the ground flat as a flapjack and quiet as a dead mouse. The children had seen two witch ladies dressed in black earlier and run a mile away and been lying in the sugarcane for the hours since. They’d never once spoken and barely moved and slept in fits, one little girl starting awake when her hand slipped from her ear and she half-heard a distant voice calling, Baby? Honey? It was a lady’s voice. Darling? Sweet pea? Doll? Angel? then repeating the cycle but ending this time with Dolly, which was what this girl’s mother had pet-named her. Dolly clambered up, still half-asleep. With straw in her hair and her nightdress torn and soiled she toddled off toward the lady beginning her list again. Baby? Honey? Darling? Sweet pea?
11 THE TOWN
THE BAILIFF, MCKISSICK, RAISED HIS ELBOW TO WARD OFF THE blacksmith’s next blow and heard his wrist snap. He called out his own name and said that they had Smonk on the run, he was theirs for the taking, but Gates seemed intent on murder. He raised the stock again and brought it down and McKissick’s world darkened at its edges and the room began to peel away and he was sinking in a warm, pleasant sea.
Gates stood panting. The rifle slick with blood. His face red with it. He staggered back against the log walls, his hands shaking. He couldn’t get his breath, he thought he might vomit. McKissick lay still in his own blood. Dead? Gates watched a gorgeous blue knot unwhorl from the bailiff’s temple as if his brains were about to rupture. Alive yet, or how might a knot rise? The blacksmith clenched his fists to still his hands and stepped past the dead whore and searched among the wreckage of the cabin until he found a huge butcher knife stuck in a wall and fell across his former partner. McKissick was naked and wearing his, Gates’s, shoes. He touched the blade to the bailiff’s chest where he imagined the heart to be and raised his other hand, palm flat. He closed his eyes.
He opened them.
McKissick had him by the balls. Gates forgot the knife and tried to twist away but the bailiff only squeezed harder. Somehow McKissick had gained the knife and swiped Gates across the chest and the gush of blood was such that the bailiff nearly choked on it before he could scrabble away and watch the man twitch and gurgle.
He tried to pull himself up and overturned a table. He couldn’t focus his eyes. He sat against the wall, trying to catch his breath. The room seemed bright. Then it seemed very bright.
Meanwhile, from the hill at the edge of the east woods, Ike gazed at the irregular houses and buildings and oak trees of Old Texas. He’d done this slow circuit dozens of times before, the town globed in his spyglass as he scanned the angles and doors of each building and outbuilding. A ladder that wasn’t there yesterday. The alterations of firewood piles and how long it took a splotch of birdshit to fade from a windowsill. There were ten widows in the town, ages he’d calculated from forty to eighty-five, and half a dozen young women and girls. He knew who lived where. Who’d had which husband.
Ike squatted and studied the ruin of the hotel. Looked like nothing saved, a total loss. He smiled grimly—Smonk always had been thorough—and focused the telescope when he saw a widow go in the livery barn’s side door and, a moment later, the girl he’d seen go in three hours ago come out.
Shift change. What were they guarding?
Near dusk, from beside a tall oak in the southeast, he spied a wildcat crawling on its belly toward the well. It raised to its hind legs to drink but at the sight of the water it convulsed and ran down into the town snapping its teeth. A widow hurried out and shot it with a snake charmer four-ten. She returned a moment later carrying a pitchfork with which she speared the cat and lugged it out of his sight. Ike moved for a better vantage and found himself watching the smoldering pile of dead animals they always kept burning. The widow tending it, in her early forties, used her stick to help the other dislodge the wildcat from her tines. When the first left, Ike watched the second douse the new arrival in kerosene and strike a match and drop it on the animal which burst into flame. The dog and cat faces in his spyglass frozen in waxen agony.