Smonk

by Tom Franklin

  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.

  Now the colored man took up his shotgun from the corner. Jest sleep on, he thought and closed the door behind him and turned the key in its lock and descended the stairs, stepping around boards that might creak, not looking at the dead man in the parlor or his widow drooling on the sideboard.

  He went out into the alley and down the back of the doctor’s and let himself in through a window. In the office he struck a match and read the labels of the brown medicine bottles and selected this one and that. He moved through the house and peered into the main room where the doctor lay dead, his widow standing at the window staring out. She sensed him and turned. He caught her before she could scream and clamped a cloth rag over her mouth, her husband’s own chloroform fainting her instantly.

  Outside he crept building to building wiring dynamite. He’d just finished and stood to stretch his back when he spied another lady in black walking along the livery barn wall with a bucket. She set it down and reached back in her hair and shadowed her face with a veil. Then she and her pail slipped in the livery door and a moment later the same door opened and another lady came out covering a yawn. She threw back her veil to the air.

  Ike crept along the livery’s shadowed east wall. The barn had spaces between boards and it was through such a space that he saw the girl in the cell. Lanternlight yellowing the hay. The lady he’d seen go in was guarding her. The bucket was her stool.

  He twisted his head to better see.

  It was her.

  O God here she was. He’d never seen her before, but he knew it was her. He turned his shoulders to the wall and leaned against it, sinking to his backside where he sat for a long minute. He looked up at the sky. He didn’t believe it. What you gone do next? he asked the stars. What ain’t you gone do?

  He hurried back through the alley to the house and inside, past Mrs. Tate in her restless sleep, up the stairs into the room. Eugene hadn’t stirred. His belly rose and fell and the air seemed fouler from his dying. Ike set
the medicine bottles along the table and selected one and another and mixed them and poured them into Eugene’s whiskey gourd. He sat in a chair in the corner thinking. Then stood and squeaked opened the chifforobe and gazed at the colors. A moment later, his arms full of clothes, Ike left the room.

  When the key clicked in the lock Smonk opened his eyes. He rocked back and forth on the bed, gathering momentum, then rolled onto the floor. Ike was gone. He stood sucking air into the bloody scraps of his lungs. He reached for his glasses and gourd and unstoppered it and drank deeply.

  Little morphine kick, he said, raising the licker. Brother Isaac, I thank ye.

  He drank again and hung the gourd around his neck and took one of the bottles and stripped the sheet from the bed. He hefted his lucky detonator and grabbed the coil of wire. Downstairs Ike was gone, and Mrs. Tate had barely moved, just the hitch of her shoulders as she snored. She wore black, which made her tinier.

  He set his wares down quietly and undid the gourd and drank again. He found the snake of wire Ike had left and twisted it to the wire he’d brought and hitched it up to the detonator. He disappeared down the hall and returned holding a broom and, behind the old woman, flapped out the bedsheet and within a moment had employed a trick he’d learned from Kansas City teamsters where you fasten your victim to his chair with a sheet, tightening the sheet by a broom handle affixed to the back. With nothing showing but her neck and head, he twisted the handle and stood behind her where she couldn’t see him and held her until she stopped convulsing.

  I got some questions for ye, he said, blowing hot sulfur breath in her ear.

  He thumbstruck a match and lit a candle on the sideboard by Justice Tate’s head.

  The old lady wriggled in her cocoon and he tightened it a turn. She was trying to shake her head but his hand had her face. Behind her, he looked down her length, points of her feet at the bottom.

  You won’t get away, he said. Especially if I have to strangulate ye. But if ye swar to be a good ole girl, I’ll let ye loose at the mouth. All right?

  Rage in her roiling eyes and the electric rod of her body, but he held her as long as she could flex and presently she went limp and he loosened the broom.

  Okay. There. He lifted his palm from her mouth and moved around into the candlelight. Red bars the shape of his fingers and thumb on her cheeks.

  Who—her voice a jar of wet sand opened—Who are you?

  He leaned his head closer and removed the hat and glasses, his good eye twinkling in the candlelight.

  When she saw who it was her body spasmed anew.

  What’s the matter? he asked, muffling her screams. Ain’t ye glad to see me?

  Christian Deputy Loon, meanwhile, heard a horse fast approaching and, careful not to point, tried to flag down its rider who seemed to be naked, burnt to a crisp, caked in dusty blood and carrying a giant rifle. But the stranger passed in the moonlight, racing toward Old Texas. Deputy Loon sighed. He took off his right boot and scratched between his toes. He put the boot back on. He sat for what seemed an hour of time and eventually lay forward on his horse’s neck and entwined his fingers in its mane and closed his eyes and slept and dreamed of a town burning and a horde of women fleeing the flames and overtaking him on the horse, dragging him down, tearing him into pieces. Boy was he glad it was only a dream.

  12 THE WAKE

  EVAVANGELINE SAT UP. SUDDENLY THIS TALL NIGGER SHE’D NEVER seen before had appeared in the livery room and clamped a cloth to the guard’s nose before she could rise from her stool and sound the cowbell. He let her drop to the hay and peered through the bars. He brought up a long finger for silence and knelt and looked her so hard in the eye it made her fidget in her bonds. He rubbed his chin, like a gambler wondering what his discard should be, then lifted the key off its nail and unlocked the cage and cut her loose and handed her a bundle of clothing and underthings. Up close she could see his coiled white hair beneath his hat brim. The gray goatee. The lines of his face that would tell stories if a person could read such maps.

  He nodded at the clothes and turned to give her privacy. She stretched and flexed and stripped from the shift they’d dressed her in and stood naked in the hay and held things up to discern them arm or leg then wormed her feet down the stockings and dress and fitted her fists down the sleeves. When she was finished he crooked his finger for her to follow. On her way out she unstuck the Mississippi Gambler from the wall and concealed it in her dress.

  Outside, the widow-guards began to shoot at them but hit nowhere near Evavangeline as she followed the mysterious stranger over a rail fence into the crisp sugarcane leaves and after a time into the woods. The dress impeded her walking so she lagged back and used the knife to cut off the bottom half. Under it the stockings came near to her thigh. The skirt material was pretty and, still following the old nigger, she fashioned a headdress from the cloth. It was too hot to wear, so she left it collapsed over a stump like a bride weeping in the woods. Because the top half of the dress was cumbersome yet, she ripped off the sleeves at the shoulders and rolled them down her arms and left them strung along twigs of knuckled black oak like tunnels of spiderweb. When it was still hard to breathe she unfastened the top buttons of the blouse and then the bottom ones, noticing how the wires in the corset made her tits bigger. She pushed through a brake bush and into the nigger-man’s campsite where he sat smoking a pipe. Arms folded, wrapped in his coat despite the heat. He had a small fire with a pail of something bubbling over it, held aloft by a spit and sticks. But if he was surprised by her appearance it never showed on his face.

  I miss the sound of a dog at night, Mrs. Tate said, bound by the bedsheet to her chair. He’d hung a shawl over her shoulders to conceal her confinement and they’d sat for half an hour without a word spoken between them. Once in a while Smonk would elicit a squeak of air from her by tightening the broom handle.

  From outside came the sound of gunshots, no surprise as the guard-women were prone to accidental discharges even when they weren’t terrified. Still, Smonk signaled for silence as voices clanged in the street and footsteps clumped over the porch. A breathless guard-widow burst in the parlor and reported that a nigger had stole the girl they’d captured. What should they do?

  Unseen behind the door, Smonk touched the tip of his sword with his tongue.

  Let them go, Mrs. Tate said. We’ll find them tomorrow.

  The widow looked doubtful but nodded and took this order outside.

  Meanwhile a flock, or a swarm—or whatever their group designation was—of bats had inexplicably attacked Walton and Donny, occasioning the understandably panicked horse to throw its rider. Walton’s boot was entangled in the stirrup which battered him along behind the horse as it fled, shrieking madly. When he’d come loose at last, the flying rodents pursued their equine target and left the human one stunned in the dust. The same had occurred with the late Onan, dragged as he’d been by his departing mount. The stirrups, in opposition to what that sales clerk had said, were obviously inferior.

  Yet somehow unscathed he rose, searching his arms for pinprick bites, worried about the dread “hydrophobia,” sorry that his rifle had been scabbarded on his saddle and sorrier still that he’d surrendered his pistol to the horrific man in the wagon. Also, his sword was missing, as were most of the pieces of equipment from his extra pockets, victim to his being floundered over the terrain. He felt a passing anger at the tailor who’d assured him the pocket flaps were guaranteed “tip-top,” and wondered what the rotund Italian craftsman would think knowing the terrain over which his pants walked tonight.

  A quick inventory revealed that Walton had retained only his medicinal flask, magnifying glass, fishing kit and whistle, which he brought to his lips but decided against blowing. Perhaps stealth might prove a better tactic out here in such sprawling wilderness. Even his goggles were gone. His compass as well, so he had no idea which direction he should go. Perhaps he ought to remain here, near the site of his fall, hoping to retrieve pieces of the va
luable equipment on the morrow.

  Wait! The North Star. Nature’s omnipresent Saint of the Lost. He gazed into the heavens and spotted that beacon of hope glimmering and counted it a small personal success. He wished he had his logbook. He rubbed his backside and thought of the bats and shuddered. Perhaps he’d best make haste. The full moon gave ample light for him to traipse through the “cane,” beyond which he could discern a copse of trees. He made this his target and began to run, hoping the shelter would remove the danger of another bat-attack.

  In the copse, he soon lost himself in total darkness and became entangled in a crosshatch of spiderweb, ivy, vine, weed and briar, quite a morass. Walton shoved at the morass but it shoved back and he thought he felt spiders in his hair. In a panic, he began to flail his arms and bat his way through, an immediate mistake as a low horizontal limb at throat’s height laid him flat and knocked out his breath.

  When he opened his eyes, he thought he heard voices. He rolled onto his belly, his neck sore and skin burning from its various cuts and abrasions, but his head felt clear, in fact very clear, and he knew the thing to do was steal closer to the voices without giving himself away. Remaining prone, he passed beneath the thickest of the thicket and presently the underbrush thinned to a civil level and he crept forward tree to tree, moonlight beaming through in columns.

  Soon he’d spotted a campfire and, after discerning the wind’s direction by licking his finger and pointing in the air, he prepared to come in “downwind.” He’d have removed his hat had he had it. Instead, he separated each metal item from the other to avoid clinking and began to scuttle forward, noiselessly, soon raising his eyes over a fallen log to fix them upon the precocious Negro wagon-driver from before and, seeing her from the rear, what looked to be a bride with her clothing rent.