He sat up in bed, wearing a woman’s gown. Candles were burning. The Gramophone crackling.
Wait! he cried. He was wearing lipstick.
What in the world? She kicked his chamber pot aside and tugged at the revolver in her waistband. It was caught.
The man was begging, saying he was joshing her, she wasn’t really going to die.
To shut him up she snaked her head in and bit a hunk out of his neck and spat it on his sheets like an oyster. He gaped at her then began to scream. She unsnagged the gun and grabbed him by the waddle under his chin and shot him in his right eye and then steadying his head shot him in his left and then straight through the nose, his lips still forming words. Turning his chin left, right, she put one in each earhole at certain angles so that there was little left above the lower jaw, the top half of his head back-hanging like a hood of hair. His bottom row of teeth was intact, she noticed, her face red from his splatter. She tipped out the blood and prized free a gold molar with her knife and let him go and when he fell his head bled across the bunk like a can of paint overturned. She stepped back reloading. The gunpowder at such range had burned the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. The Gramophone’s needle had been knocked ajar and she set it back and then, for a moment of her life, as smoke curled in the air, she listened to strings of Handel.
Anon. A lovely, leafy day. Sunlight and high cloudwork serrating the sky.
After breakfasting on cheese and “grits” and having a productive B.M. in the reeds, Walton clopped his eager stallion along Dauphin Street, making an entry in his logbook, majestic magnolias scenting the bay air with their hearty perfumes and massive live oaks columning the street, the humid shadows back from the road half-claiming mansions stately and proud, some burnt or in disrepair from the War lo these years hence but still displaying their once-splendor in the way only ruins can.
Behold Nature’s Holy Cathedral, Walton proclaimed, cross-stitched with Man’s finest architecture, and leavened by his will for destruction. Blessed be Thy name, Lord, that I am Thy servant proceeding on a Mission to spread Thy Gospel and dispense Thy Justice among these wretched heathens. He began to pump his fist in the air and hum “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He saluted a drunk trying to urinate on a streetlamp and in return the man brandished his middle finger or “shot him a bird” in the vernacular and cursed in French.
Walton turned a cold profile and trod on. The previous night’s fireside discussion had yielded nothing except cross words that ended with several deputies trying to “lynch” poor Ambrose. Confiscating their noose, the commander had dismissed the men for some “R & R”; he suspected that most of them had gone whoring and drinking as this morning he’d found several empty liquor bottles and more than a few feminine undergarments scattered among their soiled belongings. And even snoring they’d been scratching at their privates; which, of course, meant another infestation of “crabs.” Ah, the yoke of command weighed heavy.
Since he’d been unable to roust them from their slumber, and since the sight of the frilly, indeed diaphanous pantaloons, girdles, slips, garters, corsets, bras, et cetera, was distracting him from his mission, and because Ambrose was nowhere to be found, Walton had decided to visit the boardinghouse alone. Indeed, it might be less intimidating for his subject that way. He was brilliant, quick-witted and a charmer, Phail Walton, who prided himself on having no sexual impulse whatsoever. Nil. Nada. He used his male member to void through, and that was it. A purely functional length of hose. Voiding, he wouldn’t even touch it, would merely let it protrude and perform its task; and if it ever betrayed him and became engorged in his pants, he would pinch the purple turtle’s-head end, like Mother used to, and it would recede. When he had a night emission he would slam his fingers in the door come dawn and drink a pint of his own urine.
The twelve or so deputies (the number varied, sometimes day to day) who accompanied him on his adventures were required to believe similarly, though not as strongly as Walton did; they never had to purposefully injure themselves, for instance. He led prayer meetings at night where the men held hands around the fire. He made them find one thing each day for which to thank God. He frowned on whiskey drinking and encouraged washing and dental hygiene. He gave his testimony frequently. He urged the deputies to commit good deeds, such as taking an old woman’s elbow as she crossed a street or thwarting a bank robbery. He taught the troops hymns and patriotic songs and had them memorize the poetry of Lord Byron and that of a startling new voice, a certain Mister Whitman:
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
In general, the deputies were eager learners.
What the hell—
Language, said Walton at his chalkboard.
Heck. What the heck do it mean, “puffed and declined”?
Ah, said their leader. Excellent question! Anybody? Anybody?
Nobody.
Well, said Walton, writing, it’s a “M-E-T-A-P-H-O-R.”
The deputies nodded.
That’s what I knowed it was, said Loon.
On occasion, Walton would discover one of the men drunk, “stoned,” or rubbing himself against some whore’s bottom. Or concealing a sackful of stolen money. About this subject their commander was a forgiving sort and would simply and sadly give the backslider a dressing-down, confiscate any contraband, and dock the deputy’s pay. Cursing, however, was another matter entirely. It was not tolerated. Walton could recite a list of names dozens long of men unable to retain his status as a Christian Deputy; and in nine of ten cases it wasn’t excessive robbery, murder, arson, treason or even unusual or deviant sexual proclivities but profanity that saw these men’s careers wilt.
Walton and his deputies wore matching uniforms—duster coats, crimson shirts and khaki pants with extra thigh-pockets filled with snake-bite kits, cartridges, harmonicas, jew’s harps, spoons, flasks (medicinal only), chewing gum, telescopes, pencils, Bibles, thimbles, compasses, pocketknives, jelly beans, wire brushes, magnifying glasses and whistles, among other items. Walton supplied each man and paid a monthly wage from his mother’s dwindling bank account in Philadelphia. The deputies wore across their eyes an expensive new instrument called Dark-Lensed Goggles ($1.11 per pair). The goggles made them look like the outer-space monsters they’d been hearing about of late but cut down on headaches from the sun and theoretically gave one certain advantages in a gun battle on a bright day. The men wore identical tall black polished Creedmoor riding boots tucked crisply in their pants. They wore golden ascots. They wore stiff-brimmed hats and leather gloves with fringes. Each bore a Colt revolver on his gunbelt and a Winchester thirty-thirty strapped across his back. An imitation United States cavalry sword (half the price of the original) on his hip.
Now, in full uniform, armed and “goggled,” Walton on his mission of reconnaissance marched across the Dauphin Street boardinghouse’s famous porch with his left hand resting on his sword handle and with his right rapped thrice on the door. The homely, bonneted woman who answered refused to cooperate unless bribed, and after having been “jewed” down from her original asking price of eleven dollars to ten and four bits, the woman spat a glob of snuff juice between two fingers and stated the name, which Walton repeated to himself in a whisper and had her spell again as he penciled it in his Christian Deputy logbook. He noticed she spelled it differently this time.