Ghost Town: A Novel Read online

  Whut’s yer relationship to the lawr, kid? the piano player asks him around the bobbing tobacco stick as he rolls off the piano lid and goes over to haul his golden pants up and strap the belt back on. The children’s song has been displaced by something more elegaic. A dirge maybe.

  Aint got one. Yu the sheriff?

  Nope. Jest a deppity. We’re a mite short on sheriffs. Yu lookin fer work?

  I dont think so, he says, but he sees he doesn’t have much choice. There’s a badge already pinned on his fringed shirt: a bent-tipped star pierced by a bullet hole and black with blood.

  Howdy, sheriff.

  Yo, sheriff, how’s tricks?

  The men in the street greet him affably and tip their hats as he and his deputy step out of the saloon onto the wooden sidewalk in the glazed light of midday. He touches the brim of his tengallon in reply, his other hand clutching his cocked rifle, unsure as yet of the men’s true intentions. They are dragging some portly redfaced man in a crumpled top hat and three-piece suit toward a gallows that is still being knocked together in the middle of the dusty street.

  Whut’s happenin here? he wants to know, for he reckons it now to be his office to inquire into such civic doings.

  Aw, it’s jest the damn banker, sheriff. Taint fair him havin alla money and us none, so we’re stringin him up. The little fat man’s pockets are stuffed to overflowing with stocks and bonds and paper money, and bills stick out under his hat brim and from the tops of his boots. Paper trails him, scattering in the desert wind, as far back as the doors of the bank.

  But aint yu sposed t’try a feller afore yu hang him?

  Naw, sheriff! Haw!

  We aint got time fer thet kinder bullpoop.

  Well I aint been in this job long, but thet dont seem right.

  Out in these parts it does, sheriff. It’s how it’s done.

  Yu aint fixin t’fuck with how things are, are yu, sheriff?

  I aint fixin t’nuthin. Jest aimin t’do my job proper.

  The mob stands there in his way as though challenging him to give them his approval or face big trouble, their faces obscured in-black shadows cast by their hat brims. He’s not fearful of them, he’s tempted even to have it out with the scum, but they may be right about the law, who’s he to say? he’s new to this line of work. Well awright, he says and clears his throat. Jest this one time, then.

  He watches as, grinning their shadowy yellow grins under the fierce noonday sun, they tow the condemned banker through the dust toward the gallows. His scrawny deputy, hunched over beside him with a cigarillo between his liverlips, has remained silent through all this, and he feels uneasy, as if he might have said and done less or more than he should have. So whuddayu figger, deppity? The badge newly pinned to his buckskin shirt seems to lie right against his skin, the rimmed bullethole in it pressed round his left nipple like a hot cookie cutter. Like tying a string around a finger not to forget something and then setting it alight. Whut should we rightly be doin?

  I dunno, says his deputy, pinching the cigarillo butt in his thin gnarled fingers. He hacks up a clot and arcs it a couple of yards into the water trough, then tucks the cigarillo back in his mouth. Spect we should mebbe oughter git over t’the bank.

  The deputy hitches up his pants and, rocking back and forth on his short bowed legs, moseys off that way, with the sheriff tagging along behind like someone who might belong here. Well, maybe he does. Doesn’t belong anywhere else, and it sure beats hauling his wretched ass all alone across that desert out there. Until now he’s always been homeless as a cloud shadow, as a dying cowpoke he once met described himself while passing on, but whether by choice or luck or nature, he can’t say. Just that he’s always kept moving, as though moving were the same thing as breathing and giving up the one might finish off the other. Maybe that departing poke passed it on to him like an infection or a case of crabs. Though there was a time, he remembers, or seems to, when for a brief space he settled down and took up sheep ranching. He’d won twenty dollars one night in a keno game and bought the whole ranch for that, including a hundred head of sheep, a potato field, a wife, and six or seven kids, counting it a bargain, even though the rancher he bought it from, a hulking blond-bearded man with steel-blue eyes, was grinning when he took his money. He learned the sheepherding, shearing, and butchering trade, worked hard at it, and might well have lived and died a sheepman on the prairie, for it seemed like something worth doing, even if in truth he hated every minute of it. But then one day the cattlemen came and killed all his family and burned the ranch down and shot the sheep and dug up the potatoes and then pissed on everything to kill the grass and spoil the edibles, and that was the end of his twenty-dollar adventure in the granger life. He remembers staring down on that vast expanse of dead pee-soaked sheep like it was yesterday. They lay about like muggy wet clouds fallen from out the sky, as indecorously out of place in those scrubby fields as he was, and, without mentioning their unfortunate condition, he managed to trade them off to a neighbor, sight unseen, for an old broomtail hobbler, and he left that part of the country and never looked back. His memory of the family he had for that time is less substantial. All he recalls is that before they got killed they ate a lot. Some time later, he ran into the man who’d sold him the ranch, and the fellow, who’d gone off to be a lumberjack and work on the railroads, remarked over a friendly glass of whiskey that acquiring property was nothing more than laying claim to a burial plot and so put too early an end to things. Death is more fun, he said with a weary blue-eyed wink, his gun on the table, ifn yu let it sneak up on yu unawares in places where yu thought yu’d ducked it.

  He and his deputy follow the trail of paper money through the sunbaked street toward the bank, and as they pass the claims office, which seems to have crossed over the street and turned halfway round since the last time he saw it, he can hear a row boiling up inside. I claim yu’re a nogood snot-ugly varmint, he hears one man holler, and another shouts back: And I claim I’m gonna bust yer fuckin ass! There are gunshots and someone crashes through a plate-glass window.

  Uh-oh. Reckon we oughter go see whut’s goin on, deppity? he asks, sweaty kid-gloved hand on his pistol butt.

  Now, dammit, sheriff, ifn yu let ever little shit thing distract yu, how we ever gonna git our job done?

  His deputy seems to have lost his hump on the walk over and now has to take off his hat and duck his bald head going through the bank doors. Inside, the place is wrecked, furniture busted up and heaped about, windows measled with bullet holes, obscenities all over the adobe walls, and money is lying around everywhere. A little boy comes in behind them and picks up a coin, and the deputy whirls round and shoots him dead. Jest caint abide a thievin brat, he growls around his brown cigarillo, and he picks the boy’s body up and hangs it on a coat hook. His deputy has an ugly scar, he sees now, across one eye and down into the other cheek. He might be hard to recognize but for the yellow suspenders. Y’know, when it comes t’metin out justice, sheriff, he says, the cigarillo bobbing like a wagging finger, yu’d appear a smidgen slow on the draw.

  Ho, sheriff, about time yu got over here, greets the bank teller, pocketing his wire-framed spectacles and adjusting his sleeve garters. Whut with all’s been goin on, I aint had no one t’spell me, and I’m sorely pinin fer a quick snort. So how about yu jest take over here at the winder a minnit whilst me’n the deppity go wet the whistle?

  But I dont know nuthin about bankin.

  Hell, me neither, sheriff. Fuckin mystery is whut it is.

  His deputy lays a cold bony arm around his shoulder and, his breath smelling like rotten leather, whispers raspily in his ear: Watch out fer them gold nuggets in thet vault over thar, sheriff. Then he and the teller leave him, heads ducked and laughing bitterly, and he goes over to check the vault: no nuggets, nothing in there but rat turds and a few sick flies. He tries, just the same, to close the heavy steel door, but it falls off its hinges, slamming the wooden floor with a thunderous kerwhump! It just misses the t
oes of his new boots and sends paper money fluttering into the air like chickens trying to take off, or like dead leaves stirred up by a sudden blow, a memory from some forgotten time of trees, of whole forests of them, back before he entered on the desert.

  He peels off his white kid gloves to give his hands some air and then, for lack of any larger inspiration, he tucks the cigarillo in the corner of his mouth (he recalls now that the deputy, before leaving him, stuck his own half-smoked butt into his lips like a kind of advance on his wages and then, grinning a crooked grin, snapped a long bony finger at his badge, sending a sharp pain through him like a sudden toothache in the breast) and sets about sweeping the scattered money into a corner with a broom. The building, though hot and airless, has a dank underground smell that spooks him, as does that dead kid hanging there, one shoulder hitched up over his head by the hook, the other hanging limp below his gapping chin, which has been half shot away. It’s so uncomfortable-looking, it makes him feel all pent up, and he regrets that this sheriffing business, which he perceives will take some getting used to, hinders him from just going off on a bust and getting wholesomely tanked and then shooting things up and stomping a lot of people until he can calm down. He recollects something a lawman once told him—or it might have been some outlaw he partnered up with for a time: Lawr’n order, son, he said, is a lot like shittin reglar: mostly makes the day run smoother, but folks need a violent dose a the trots now’n then jest not t’git all stoppered up’n lose their fightin edge.

  While he’s meditating on the shit side of the law and how it might play out in his new career, the barroom chanteuse with the orange curls and ruby-studded cheek comes in with four or five men masked in neckerchiefs and walks up to his grille at the counter.

  Though she looks like she’s probably up to no good, he tells her howdy in a sociable way and asks her if she wants to make a deposit.

  No, but I’d be mighty grateful ifn yu would, sheriff, she says back with a wink, digging at herself between her legs with her left hand while pointing a pistol at him with her right. Actually, darlin, it’s a holdup.

  Well, he sighs, I should oughter arrest yu all, but they aint nuthin wuth stealin. The gold nuggets is already gone.

  I know, sheriff, we stole them some while back. Whut we come fer t’day is thet silver badge yu’re sportin.

  No, caint let yu have thet.

  Now yu aint sayin yu wanta die fer thet dang tin star!

  Nope. But I aint givin it up neither.

  Now aint thet feller fulla beans!

  Lissen at him blowin smoke!

  I think I reckanize the sumbitch, Belle, says one of her fellow desperadoes, a one-eyed graybeard with a lumpy nose, best he can tell behind the bandanna. Thet thar’s the dude whut done in Big Daddy.

  Yu dont say!

  Hell, lets jest whup his weedy butt and take thet star, Belle!

  Yeah, and all them fancy duds t’boot!

  I could strictly use me a blade like thet!

  Now jest git a grip on yer dicks, boys! Dont wanta mess with the sheriff when he’s all hotted up like this. Yu seen whut he kin do when his dander’s up. The chanteuse hitches one breast as though repocketing it in its cup and gives his golden buckskin breeches a slow affectionate study, then peers up at him and winks dreamily, scratching her crotch with her pistol barrel. Best we rob sumthin else.

  Aw shit, aint all thet much here, Belle, whines a runty pop-eyed bandit with ears tattooed like spiderwebs. Most everthin’s tuck whut’s wuth takin.

  Well, says the chanteuse languidly, and the pistol goes off between her thighs, sending a bullet ricocheting around the hollow bank lobby like a hornet on a tear—he ducks as it whines past, and it caroms hollowly off the steel doorframe of the vault, then exits through a window, where, outside in the noonday sun, a yelp is heard, though whether animal or human, hard to tell. When he raises his head, his own six-shooters drawn, he notices there’s a hole in the chanteuse’s skirts he can see clean through like a peephole into nothing, and there are only two or three men in here now where before there were more. She licks her smoking gun barrel suggestively, and says: They’s thet boy hangin thar. I reckon we could steal him. Thet awright, sheriff honey?

  The boy? He’s kinder sorta dead.

  I know. Little peckerwood warnt wuth cowpie when he wuz kickin, but in his present condition he’s got some doobobs we can sell. Or eat.

  How about it, sheriff? demands a masked fat man wearing batwing chaps and a soft tattered vest, split from armpit to hem. We gotta shoot it out or whut?

  He stares through the grille at the chanteuse and her disreputable gang, weary of this exchange and wondering if maybe he ought to take up some other trade altogether, like prospecting or cattle rustling. Or maybe just throw in with the chanteuse and her warm powdered bosom; who’s he to right wrongs and punish evil? His gaze is drawn into the hole in her skirts as toward a far hazed horizon which he knows to be both a promise and the absence of all promise, and so a terrible and fatal lure, and it brings to mind something else that steely-eyed sheep rancher said, or maybe it was the dying cowboy: They aint nuthin wuth dyin fer out here, pard, he said, cept choosin yer own dyin, and dyin fer it aint choosin it neither. Inbetwixt times, yu jest keep on adventurin on accounta the generalized human restlessness and cuz the end of whutall else is emptiness and the end of adventurin is emptiness too. He pulls his attention up out of the hole and out of his doleful cogitations, which have taken a spell, though no one seems to mind. Well the boy aint like proppity, he sighs, this decision having come to him, somewhat like the town did, rather than he to it. He holsters his pistols, flicks the butt away. Do whut yu damn please. And, taking up his rifle, he leaves the thieves to their drear pickings and steps out into the sudden desert night.

  The first thing he sees as his eyes adjust to the moonless dark is the hanged man twisting melancholically on his rope. His fancy eastern duds are gone, probably stolen; he’s naked except for weathered cowhide chaps, old busted-up boots, and a round felt hat, which cozies his head down to his nose. He looks like he’s chewing a dead cigar with his ghostly butt and drooling tobacco juice from it; probably a roll of paper money shoved up there and set alight in respect of some juridical tradition from these parts; his mouth’s stuffed with it too, in and around the erected tongue. The creaking of the gallows rope, a distant howl, and his own footsteps in the grit of the empty street are the only sounds to be heard.

  In the dim starlight, that grit glows pallidly all the way to the encircling horizon, the town’s shabby structures negatively silhouetted against it, or else blackly lost in the black sky, discernible only where they blot out the stars. The hanging banker’s his lone companion out here: all’s shut down, even the bank, back there somewhere in the night behind him. The saloon, too, of course, no use looking in there, he knows what he’d find. He should have asked his deputy where the jail was; he could have spent the night in it. Assuming the night’s his for spending in a place like this.

  He sorely misses his mustang now. Though it was its locomotory aspect that he most valued on the way here, now it’s his thoughts that are most afflicted by the horse’s absence. Astride it, he always seemed to know where he wanted to go, what he was meant to do. It even, oddly, made him feel rooted somehow, and thus somebody, somebody with a name, even as they drifted, he and the horse, uncompassed yet resolute, across this boundless desolation. The creature was a living part of him, which fit him as if born with him like his hat and boots, but it shared his miseries, too, his pains and hungers, absorbing some of them as rags might stanch a wound. And he’d got used to the view. Down here on the ground, he feels somewhat blinkered, things risen up around him that used to be mapped out below at some safer remove.

  Not that he was gentle toward that evil-eyed bandy-shanked old cayuse, as he referred to it in his more sentimental humors. He respected it and shared what little he had with it, but it possessed a wayward mind of its own, and when it got too refractory, he had to take
the whip to it or dig his spurs bone-deep into its flanks and haul on the bit till its mouth frothed and bled. Couldn’t let the dumb beast beat him.

  Though in the end it did. They’d been out under that scorching sun for what seemed like years when they struck upon a fresh watering hole: just seemed to pop up out of nowhere. The rim of it was littered with the bleached bones of men and horses and he supposed it might be poisoned so he let the horse drink first to see what would happen. Nothing did, so he joined the horse at the edge, drinking with his face in the water and then from his hat. The water was clean and sweet and so cold it made his teeth ache. He soaked himself, filled his canteen, and got ready to move on, but the horse had contrary notions and wouldn’t budge from the spot. This was stupid, there was nothing to eat, no protection from the blistering sun, and anyway it made no larger sense, but the cantankerous thing seemed ready just to give it all up and toss in there with all those other anonymous bones. He talked to it, cajoled it, cursed it, kicked it, tried to lead it away on foot, yanked on its ears and bridle, used the horsewhip on it, his rifle stock, but the useless old scrag would not move; it was as still and stubborn as stone. Then, after he’d been whipping it mercilessly until his arms were ready to drop, he saw that what he was beating was stone and the damned horse was over on the other side of the hole, head down, still serenely lapping up water. He was furious. He whistled sharply at the perverse beast and it stepped toward him, into the water, and disappeared. In panic, he dove in after it, but the hole was only a foot deep and he hit the bottom hard. The water was warmer now and tasted salty and stung his eyes. When he could see again, he saw that the horse was standing in the same place where he’d been beating it before and the stone was gone. So he shot it. Enough was enough. On its side, the wounded animal kept quivering and kicking at the air and it had a pitiful expression on its face, so he put the rifle to its ear and finished it off. That was when, looking up from what he’d done, he first spied this town shimmering out on the horizon. He left the saddle and trappings behind on the dead horse, figuring to come back for them later, and set off walking across the desert toward the town, exhausted from his mad struggle, his legs heavy as sandbags, half dozing even as he stumbled along, regretting what he’d done of course, man always hates to lose his horse—and then one black moonless night, a night not unlike this one, there he was, slumped in the saddle, with the mustang plodding along under him like always, a dreadful thirst upon him like he’d been sucking salt, and his canteen empty.