Meanwhile night with its endless lines had etched the county black, and from the west two figures conjoined in shadow negotiated the rails of the fence at the edge of the field and hobbled together across the dust toward the dark back windows of Old Texas. There were no dogs to bark the alarm, and though the ladies had posted armed guards at the well and next to the blacksmith’s place, with still another guard walking the street, they’d left exposed the rears of the stores. In broad-brimmed sombreros, Smonk and Ike disappeared between buildings and a few moments later the Negro returned and crossed back toward the cane.
At the Tate house, Smonk used a pair of nippers to pick the lock. He leaned against the doorjamb in the parlor. He held his walking cane in his right hand and a gourd in the other. The old lady Mrs. Tate snored, slumped in a rocking chair next to her husband dead on the sideboard. Odor of rot swirling in Smonk’s nostrils. Something else too. His stomach growled. She’d lain her head beside the dead man in the nest her arms made, shoulders rising with each breath she haled and falling when she let it go. Smonk wiped his lips with the back of his hand and came clicking in his bones toward her and bent at the waist and nosed himself to within an inch of her mouth. She was tiny as a child but her face was a thousand years old. Hair so thin it looked like dandelion puffs. Her veil lay on the floor next to her foot, fallen there or thrown he didn’t know.
Ike had returned in his soundless way with a pair of scatterguns, barrels sawn down the way Smonk liked them. He had Smonk’s lucky detonator and several coils of wire. His pockets full of TNT. He set it all down and indicated upstairs with his chin and Smonk watched him start to tote things up.
Without a look over his shoulder, the one-eye left Mrs. Tate to her slumber and ascended the stairs toting the detonator, resting halfway to the top and again on the landing. There was a door by his ear and he inclined his head and listened. He set the detonator box down and twisted the knob and the thing on the bed leaned its head toward him and snapped its gums. Smonk was about to go in when Ike came to the door behind him, the satchel cradled in his arms.
Eugene, he said. You ought not go in there.
Naw, Smonk said. He stepped in the room and closed the door on the old colored man and clicked its lock and crossed the floor. Moonlight enough he could see the ruined body, the contorted face. The eyes that he covered with his hand as he sank his knife in the invalid’s chest.
Meanwhile, the field in which the two remaining Christian Deputies displayed stooped posture upon their horses had seemed its brightest as the sun died over the treetops; dusk had lingered, then, but at last night had commenced its slow overland bleed, shadowing the trees and shrouding the deputies in its cloak. Loon remained convicted that pointing meant instant death, though the proof had vanished as Onan’s horse had tottered off several hours earlier, dragging the dead masturbator with it and leaving a swipe the width of his shoulders on the parched ground.
Now? Walton said. May we go?
Loon glanced around. It is perty dark.
Indeed. Surely yon “sniper,” if he even exists, cannot see us now, the leader said.
Yeah, Loon said out of the side of his mouth, but he might be a dang Smonk or something.
A skunk? Are they nocturnal? I suppose they are.
No, a Smonk. Loon barely moved his lips.
Is this a local “tall tale”? Walton wanted his logbook, to make a cultural entry, but was afraid to retrieve it from his thigh-pocket. His goggles hung loosely around his neck.
Well, Loon confided, some niggers thinks he’s the booger-man, I reckon. Say he goes about killing innocent white folk by tearing they dang thoats out. The ones that lives catches the ray bees and dies going mad.
Wait. Could this “Smonk” be akin to the hirsute gentleman we encountered earlier?
Do what?
The hairy gentleman in the back of the wagon? Was he a “Smonk”?
Might of been, hell. If that warn’t the booger-man the booger-man missed a good chance.
Walton gazed into the night, toward their attacker’s last known coordinates, as Loon told more gory Smonk anecdotes, and as the leader listened, he became increasingly nervous. Smonk burning down churches, eating children, laying with animals, peeing on young girls, biting people’s noses off.
Loon was saying, It was one time, he caught a fellow in the woods—
Enough! Walton said. I’m going.
Go on, Loon said out of the side of his mouth. I ain’t going nowhere. And don’t ye pint at me, neither, ye dang shit-kicker, and do me like ye done that other fellow.
You mean Deputy Onan? Don’t you know anybody’s names?
Yeah I know they names.
What’s mine?
Yer what?
Name, Loon. What? Is? My? Name?
Hang on. Who the hell’s “Loon”?
Why, you are.
Since when?
Since quite early in the adventure.
Dang a bunch of loons. My name is Oswald Heidebrecht.
Whatever. I’m still going.
Jest don’t kill me like ye did that other knucklehead. Omar, was it?
I told you. Onan. And that was coincidence.
Oh? Loon held up his fist and slowly unfurled his “pointer” finger in Walton’s direction.
Fine, fine, the leader said, tugging his ascot. You’ve made your point.
They stared at one another, surprised at the pun.
Loon began to giggle.
Walton, despite his best efforts, joined him.
Their laughter rang out, an alien noise in this diorama of drought.
Stop, Walton said. Shhhhh. If he thinks we’re laughing at him, he may open fire again.
The mood sombered, and soon the sky had pushed a red moon out of the eastern trees.
I’m going, Walton said.
Watch ye ass, said Loon.
Watch “ye” own, the leader responded. He tapped Donny’s flanks with his heels and the horse sprang into a trot, eager to quit this part of the state’s geography. Walton held his breath and bounced along in the dark with his eyes closed, trusting Donny’s finely shod hooves. Here he was, alone in the South—truly alone—for the first time, fully expecting to be shot at any moment, prickles of fear hiving his skin and “butterflies” flittering in his abdomen.
Yet he was strangely happy.
In the Tate house, Ike climbed the stairs to Smonk’s room and dribbled piss in the slop jar and stood over Eugene watching as the one-eye labored for air and tossed and flinched in pain. Each breath one closer to his merciful last. Ike folded his arms. What a specimen Eugene had been long ago, down in Mexico. Out in the west past the Rocky Mountains. Ike remembered showing him the Grand Canyon. The Mississippi River. How to hold a largemouth bass by its jaw. He remembered Eugene’s fight with a boy a couple of years older than he was. Ike and Smonk had been fishing in a deep-woods Texas pond that wore moss like a beard when a white boy of seventeen or so had crashed out of the bushes. He had several dead squirrels hanging on his belt and brandished his paltry twenty-gauge shotgun to rob them. Smonk had looked at Ike with eyes that were nearly white. No, Ike had said but Smonk was already on the boy who never fired a shot, and when Ike snatched E.O. off—careful of those teeth—he saw the bites on the screaming boy’s neck. Instead of letting the boy suffer the horror of the ray bees, Ike dragged him into the pond and held him under. With Smonk skipping rocks across the water, Ike waited and watched and turned away only when bubbles stopped blooping in the moss. Then Ike had gathered their things, wondering (not for the first time) how Eugene could watch death’s red flower bloom and throw another rock, eat another apple, go back to sleep.