Smonk!
McKissick looked around. He wasn’t in Hell. This was only its anteroom, Old Texas Alabama, where moments ago E. O. Smonk had grinned blood and drawn a sword from the air and conjured a pistol by brazen will and squirted out his eye.
McKissick opened his fingers. There it was. His breath whistled out. White glass marble with a few nicks. Blue dot in the middle. Warm. He smelled it. He rolled it in his palm and pecked it with his thumbnail. It seemed to be looking at him. He popped it in his mouth where it clicked against his teeth.
His head snapped. Gunshots! He skipped through the dead to the window and double-took when he saw two men in a wagon reloading—was it?—a got-dern Gatling gun, the design of which he’d never seen, a steam cloud hovering around them like a halo. Water-cooled. Fancy.
Expensive.
They ain’t after no picture-graphs, he said to himself. Dern, I ought to knew it. Ye done got soft, Will, thoughts of revenge plus all these women at ye.
For he himself in his official capacity had questioned the strangers at their wagon before the trial. He himself the town bailiff had been convinced of their sincerity when they demonstrated the use of their camera, having him pose with his hair flattened by oil and a grimace on his face while they huddled together at the device under a blanket. Their intention was common practice, McKissick knew, to make a picture of a dead body, which would of been Smonk if things had gone according to plan. (Often the New York Times would pay a dollar for a picture of lynched niggers or shot-up outlaws. Those wily photographers would change the body—shave the fellow, say, or add an eyepatch—and send it back for another dollar.) As McKissick had stood getting his picture made, not one hour before, a number of the ladies had gathered to watch and he’d been buffaloed, proud to be the subject of artists.
Now something moved in the street. Justice of the Peace Tate, easily recognizable by his pompadour, was crawling through the dirt away from the murderers, blood strung from his chin.
McKissick saw a third killer by the hotel, a rifleman—probably the one who’d set the building afire—waving his arms so the men in the wagon wouldn’t shoot him. He hurried through the street, sticks of dynamite in his back pockets. When he reached the justice, he shouldered his rifle and drew and pointed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and fired. Dust puffed by his foot as a bullet missed him and the gunner turned the Maxim on its swivels and laid a hail of bullets across the windowfront of the apothecary’s. Meanwhile, Mister Tate’s hair had fallen but he kept crawling. The gunman shot once more then knelt and turned the man over and began going through his shirt.
There were more pockets of return fire now and the gunner swiveled the Maxim and dragged its anchor of bullets across the storefronts and ladies dove out of sight.
The rifleman in the street grabbed his chest and McKissick looked to the large house, second floor window, where Mrs. Tate, the justice’s wife—widow—was levering her rifle to shoot again. The man she’d killed crumpled and lay on his side. The gunner tried to turn toward her house, catty-corner the hotel, but bumped the shoulder of the man filling the coolant.
McKissick was high-stepping through the logjam of arms and legs, dodging a fiery falling roof timber and grabbing Smonk’s over & under which he’d squirreled away beneath the sideboard—he’d always admired the stout Winchester and knew it would be perfectly sighted. He hopped across the undertaker and clicked the rifle’s safety with his thumb and knelt at the window and sighted the gunner no more than a second before he shot him in the temple and then shot the other man before the first landed.
McKissick stared down at the rifle, heavy in his hands, the line of upswept gray smoke from its barrels a shade lighter than the smoke in the air. You done good, he told the over & under.
Since coming to, he’d been conscious of an ache in his left side, and now that he had a quiet moment he reached inside his shirt. When he drew out his fingers bloody pellets of the rice he’d eaten for dinner were stuck there. Smonk’s got-dern sword must of run right through him. He steadied himself against the pinewood wainscotting. Gritted his teeth.
Surrender? someone called.
Across the room through coils of smoke a revolver butt flagged with a white handkerchief raised itself above an overturned table. The judge’s eyebrows inched up and then his face. He waved.
You that goddamn bailiff, he called. Ain’t ye? I forget ye name. Mic-something.
How come ye ain’t dead? McKissick asked.
How come you ain’t?
I jest about am. Case ye ain’t noticed.
God damn, said the judge, fanning at smoke. Might we finish this discussion elsewhere?
A woman screamed from outside. McKissick ducked through the window and stood blinking on the splintered porch. The wind changed the smoke’s course and the street appeared before him. He lowered the rifle.
The dead were strewn and splashed along the porch, halves and quarters of horses and men splattered in puddles of tar in the street. A crater smoking where it looked like a bomb had gone off and arms and half-legs and other fragments here and there. The world seemed too bright. McKissick felt like somebody had boxed his ears. Women followed their own screams outside and whisking their skirts over the dirt sprang corpse to corpse calling out the names of the dead. At the corner of what used to be the hotel a woman held a severed hand by its pinky and screamed, Oliver! Over in the alley by the store McKissick saw the abandoned gun, still steaming, pointed at him. He tongued Smonk’s eye around the horseshoe of his jaw.
Inside the hotel, the judge crashed over the table and fell off his dais. God damn, he cried. My arm’s on fire!
The bailiff ignored him. He looked up the street and down. His memory was coming back. The mule…
The balloon!
Where’s my boy? he yelled, so hard his wound farted. He unstuck his hand from his side and raised it to the sky, rice on his fingers. Willie! he yelled.
Still making their noise, the widows in silhouette looked up from the murdered while behind them the hotel roof collapsed, fire and smoke bursting out the top windows and a moment later those on the ground floor, the air fogged with smoke and the yowls so baleful and plaintive it seemed Hell had breeched its levee and poured forth its river of dead.
Eugene Oregon Smonk, McKissick yelled, is done stold my got-dern boy!
Ike was waiting for Smonk at the three-way crossing, smoking his cob pipe and fanning his face with his hat. He’d shaved clean but for a bristly goatee, and under thick eyebrows white as a cottonmouth’s yawn his pupil bores were pinheads, watching. Old as he was and weary, he leaned against the railing of his farm wagon holding the mule thief’s hand high behind his head as the boy squirmed, kicked, spat and cursed. The mule was biting up sheaves of grass, the balloon still floating above. The mare shivered under Smonk so he dismounted and slapped her hard on the rump. Farewell yer highness, he said and watched her gone in a rattle of dust and grasshoppers.
Ike tossed him a jug which he caught onehanded. He thumbed off its thong and drank a long time with little care for what spilled into his whiskers.
The boy groaned.
Smonk gazed down. Almighty damn, he said and took another swig. Go on turn him loose, I.
Ike released the hand and the boy fell to the ground.
You run, Smonk said, I’ll shoot ye in the ass.
Dad gum that hurt. From beside the wagon wheel, the boy glared up at Ike.
What would ye name be? Smonk asked.