The Ballad of Dingus Magee

by David Markson

  And then it was the derby that saved him. Or rather the local madam did, once she had seen the hat.

  Her name was Belle Nops. Hoke had met her on occasion through the years, although as a cowhand he had never spoken more than a dozen words to the woman, and those stricdy business. She intimidated him, as she did virtually everyone else. No one knew where she came from, although she had been something of a legend in the territory for a decade or more. She might have been forty, and she admitted to having been married once, if obscurely. She had arrived in Yerkey’s Hole with one covered wagon and two girls, both Mexicans, and had set up business in a tent near the mines. Now the tent had long since become a house of exceptional size and intricate design (evidently it had been built originally to accommodate six girls, with new rooms added haphazardly and askew as the six became twelve and fifteen and twenty; finally there were even additional stories) replete with saloon, parlors, and piano. Some of the girls were white these days also.

  Not that Hoke could afford any of either classification in his present circumstances. So he was both confused and complimented when she propositioned him. “A manager?” he said. “Me? And anyways, what kind of a job is—?”

  She was a bawdy, overwhelming woman built like a dray horse and homely as sin, almost as tall as Hoke himself, if with an astonishing bosom nearly as famous as her house. Hoke had been in the bordello itself perhaps three times during his first week in town, and then only to nurse a solitary glass of cheap Mexican pulque in its saloon each time, nor was he conscious that she was even aware of his presence until she appeared at his table peremptorily and without preliminaries on the third of those nights to say, “You, Birdsill, down on your luck, ain’t you? Come on—” She led him to a large room at the head of the main stairway which he expected to find an office and did, with a scarred desk in one corner and with a safe, but which was her bedroom also. Beneath a canopy of a sort Hoke had never seen except in pictures was a bed of a size he had not dreamed imaginable. He could not take his eyes from it. “What kind of manager?” he asked.

  “Them duds,” she told him. “Listen, if there’s one thing on this earth a frazzle-peckered cowpoke or a dirty-bottomed miner respects, it’s somebody he instinctively thinks is better than he is. You hang around in those fancy pants and you won’t even have to tote a gun half the time.”

  “Gun?” Hoke said. “Oh. What you mean, you want somebody to hold the drunks in line?”

  “And to count the take and keep the bartenders from robbing me blind and to bash the girls around too, maybe, when they get to feeling skittish. It’s got too big; I can’t watch it all by myself. All you’d have to do, you’d be here nights. I’ll give you sixty a month, room and meals too, if you want that—”

  “So I get to be a law officer, all right,” Hoke thought, “excepting it’s only in a whorehouse.” Aloud he said, “What I’m supposed to be, it’s a Colt-carrying pimp—”

  “And what you mean is, you’re afraid the boys will call you that. All right, we won’t let anybody know you’re working for me at all then. I’ll make you sheriff of the whole ragged-assed town. Hell’s bells, I own nine-tenths of the sleazy place anyway. The official sheriff’s job pays forty—”

  “But I thought a sheriff had to be—”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Hoke was only half-listening anyway. He kept glancing toward that bed.

  “That forty, and twenty more from me,” Belle went on. “All right, it’s only money—leave it at the original sixty from the house. That’s a hundred altogether and you can live in the back room of the jail, and if you spend your nights here it’ll look legitimate because we get all the action anyway—” She was standing. Hoke arose also, holding his derby. “So it’s all set. I’ll talk to the mayor tomorrow. We—”

  “Lissen,” Hoke said then. “That bed. Could I—?”

  “Bed? Well naturally it’s a bed. What else did you think it would be, a—”

  “No. I meant some night. Or some afternoon when you’re not here. Kin I jest try it out once, to see what it—”

  “Some afternoon what? When I’m not where?” Belle Nops was scowling at him. “What are you talking about? Or rather what do you think I’m talking about? Come on now, and get shed of them duds. If they’re too fancy to throw over a chair you can use the closet there. It’s—”

  “What?” Hoke said. “Use the—”

  Belle Nops had already bent to disengage her skirts. “First man in the territory in half a year who looks like he’s had a bath since the war ended. Well, come on, come on, you figure on doing it from where you’re standing, maybe?”

  “Oh,” Hoke said. “Oh. No. I were jest—” He set down the derby. “So that’s how a feller gets to be sheriff,” he said, watching her emerge.

  So if he had lost his eight hundred dollars he at least had the job he wanted now, not to mention use of that remarkable bed, among other unanticipated developments. The jail itself contained three cells and an office, and as it turned out he enjoyed this aspect of his work too. Days, he spent most of his time contemplating the warrants and the reward circulars that crossed his desk, including several for Dingus Billy Magee who it developed was worth some three thousand dollars, if not yet quite important enough to be wanted both dead and/or alive. At times Hoke apprehended an occasional drunk. “But don’t let it get your johnny up,” Belle Nops told him. “Anything that smells like it might start to involve gun-shooting, you send a telegram to the federal marshal.”

  “I aim to,” Hoke said.

  Probably he did, since he was satisfied with the arrangement precisely as it stood, and with Belle Nops herself for that matter, even if she did continue to intimidate him. Her attitude toward him was hardly less brusque, nor would Hoke ever know when to expect a demand for his more personal services. Some nights he would find her staring at him from across a room almost dubiously, or certainly with nothing like interest in her expression, let alone heat, but then a nod, a gesture, even a ticlike curl of the mouth would indicate that he was wanted; or again he might feel a tap on his shoulder at a poker or monte table and glance up to see her already marching off, not looking back as she informed him curdy, “Business matter in the office, Sheriff.” Their actual conjunction would be equally grim also, still with no more than a nod of greeting at his appearance, although this would change at once; Hoke would begin to hear immediately the slow inexorable steady mouthing of the curses, the mounting vituperation and blasphemy which startled even him, ex-cowhand, in tones flat and vicious yet somehow finally perversely impassioned too, finally lost among the enormous calving sounds and the heaving breath, the culmination. Then before he himself could recover or think to remember what she had been calling him she would be dressed and gone again, once more indifferent and contemptuous and sour. It was a little like wrestling a bear, and to no decision. Thereafter Hoke would shrug and usually remain in the bed for a time before wandering off to wait bleakly for his next unforseeable summons. At other times he would go three or even four days without so much as a word or sign from her at all, often with no indication as they passed one another in the parlors or corridors that she even knew him by sight. Hoke was also somewhat chagrined by the second door in her room, which opened onto a narrow outside stairway at the rear of the house, although he had never actually seen anyone make use of it. “But it seems a feller ought to know he’s got it exclusive for a spell, especially since she don’t appear to admire it none,” he told himself.

  Yet at moments like these he could not truly have said if it were jealousy he felt or whether he simply missed the bed itself. So then one night he lost bed and Belle both.

  Then again by virtue of the same fateful occurrence he was to find himself no longer merely an anonymous territorial sheriff but a man of parts and of fame, and with a newspaper cutting to prove it that he would carry in his billfold for years:

  Hanging of Desperado

  Dingus Billy Magee, that notorious desperado who
has been terrorizing folks throughout the New Mex. Territory, has been sentenced to hang, and good riddance say God-fearing people. As has been stated by reliable persons, said Magee was captured after a deadly gun battle in the Territory by a stalwart law officer, Mr. C. L. Hoke Birdbottom, and more power to the likes of him. It needed a brave man indeed to face up to that cowardly and murderous outlaw and Sheriff Birdbottom was just that man. He deserves his various reward money and then some.

  It happened after Hoke had worn the star about eight weeks, on a quiet Wednesday (most of Belle’s trade came on weekends). Belle herself was holding court in one of the smaller parlors, dealing faro for Texas cattlemen in what experience had already taught Hoke would be an all-night session. He had himself dealt out of his own game, climbed the stairs, stripped to his woolens, and curled self-indulgendy among the luxurious silk sheets.

  He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he sensed the sagging of the mattress as it took the extra weight, and then almost instantly the two impatient arms fetched him close.

  Still drowsy, yet puzzled vaguely by the coarse, familiarly tacky garment his own groping hands now touched, he muttered, “Well say, now, what kind of night duds you took to wearing there, Belle?”

  “Great gawd almighty!” said a voice that was decidedly not his employer’s. Nor was it even a woman’s. “Hoke Bird-sill? Is that Hoke? Well, I’ll be a mule-sniffing son of a—”

  They got to their guns simultaneously, vaulting to opposite sides of the sprawling, improbable field.

  “What the thunderation?”

  “Why, howdy do, Hoke!”

  Hoke ducked, trembling. He could see the gleam of the revolver facing him. He presumed Dingus could see his own equally well.

  “Least you could do is wake a man up afore you crawl betwixt his blankets, durn it,” Hoke protested.

  “Tell the truth, I weren’t rightly expecting you in there—”

  “I oughter blast you where you’re squatting—”

  “Don’t reckon you could hit much in this dark, not any better’n I would.”

  Hoke thought about that. “I’ll stand up and back off if you will,” he suggested.

  “We could hold a truce until we git some trousers on, I reckon.”

  “That’s near to what I had in mind.”

  “Except I don’t know as I could rightly trust you, Hoke. You still bearing a grudge about that money from your derby hat, are you?”

  “I reckon I got the privilege.”

  “Sure enough. But I reckon I ain’t gonter put aside this here Colt to climb into my pants then, neither.”

  So they squatted some more. “We’ll just sort of hold tight ‘til daylight then,” Hoke said.

  “Or ‘til Belle comes in and heaves us both out.”

  “I never took you for a beau of Belle’s, Dingus.”

  “Ain’t nothing. Older women always do sort of cotton to me, seems. It’s that boyish face I got, maybe. I never figured you for one, neither.”

  “Well—” Hoke paused, the seed of a solution in his mind now. “Tell you the truth, Dingus, I ain’t no beau at that. I were jest sort of borrowing the bed fer a spell, is the truth of it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Jest sleeping a spell.”

  “Well say, now, you mean you ain’t come into any cash money since I divested that there chapeau? You mean things has got so bad you have to take the loan of a bed in a house of ill repute that ain’t in use?”

  “Things is pretty bad, all right—”

  They continued to squat. Still thinking hard, Hoke said, “jobs is difficult to come by hereabouts, Dingus. You’d know that if’n you’d been around. But you ain’t been around lately, have you?”

  “Been over east.”

  “Well, jobs is mighty scarce. Matter of fact, things is so bad—well, it jest come to me I’d like to throw in with you, if’n you ever take partners now and then?”

  “I donno, Hoke. Sort of delicate, deciding to trust a feller bears you a grudge.”

  “I could forget the grudge right soon, once we achieved us some cash money, I reckon.”

  Dingus exhaled pensively, considering things. Hoke was still thinking for all he was worth. “My hand’s off’n my gun on the bed there, Dingus—”

  Dingus raised himself cautiously. “Back off slow, Hoke—”

  “I’m abackin’, Dingus—”

  He saw the other weapon drop finally to the bed. They stood eyeing each other.

  “Shucks,” Hoke said reassuringly, “I reckon you had to take my poke that time, once you was started robbing my hat.”

  “Weren’t no way out’n it, jest by the ethics of the thing.”

  “Sure. But meantimes, well, what’s the sense to keep up a grudge against a feller’s been my chum, even if I only knowed you here and yon? But say, I got to get this here bed tidied up before I go, or Belle is apt to skin me. You want to give me some assistance?”

  “Thisaway? Durned if’n I ever tidied up a bed in my life.”

  “Thataway’s pretty near. Wait’ll I come round and direct you. What you got to do, you lean over more, sort of not touching it at the same time, so’s you can leave the pillers all fluffed.”

  “Feller never knows when he’s gonter learn something new, I reckon. This correct?”

  “That’s right dandy there, Dingus,” Hoke told him. “And now jest sort of stay bent over a spell while I collect me your guns peaceable like, seeing as how I got my own aimed right into your miserable skull. What you jest learned, you polecat, it ain’t how to tidy up a bed, but jest what bed you should of rode clear of to start with. And you can consider yourself lucky we ain’t outside nowheres neither, or you can bet a cash dollar I’d make you pee down your woolens there too, jest to get us all the more evened up—”

  But Hoke had been in the wrong bed also, or at least at the wrong time, because Belle Nops fired him the next morning. “But he’s jest that desperado,” Hoke pleaded, “he ought to be in jail anyways.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Jesse James’s pet hound,” Belle told him. “What kind of sheriff do you think you are, galavanting around the countryside arresting outlaws when you were supposed to be keeping an eye on my whores!”

  “Well, I weren’t even actually galavanting,” Hoke insisted, ‘we was jest—”

  “Look, I don’t care if you tell me you found him in that bed of mine you spend so much time in, which as a matter of fact you likely did, since the horny little twerp has come sneaking in there and tried to assault my bloomers at least three times since he stole a key one night. Which is—”

  “What?” Hoke said, “you mean he ain’t your—?”

  “You’ll never knowjest what you lost, brother,” she said. “You can keep that badge if you want to; I don’t give a belch in a hot wind about that. But any juicy hocks you grab around here now, you’ll pay the going rate among the girls or else go dig yourself up a squaw somewheres.”

  “But Belle,” Hoke said.

  Yet it was considerably less calamitous than he thought, since there remained that reward money to compensate for the lost sinecure. First, however, a circuit judge had to be gotten hold of, to try Dingus. (The legalities themselves were remarkably informal. The judge arrived on mule-back, wearing a Remington revolver on each hip and with a Blackstone under one arm and a Bible beneath the other, and he confronted Dingus through the bars of his cell. “You Dingus Bobby Magee?” he asked. “I reckon that’s close,” Dingus allowed. “You assassinate all them critters we got warrants swore out to?” the judge asked. “How many assassinations you got?” Dingus said. “Guilty as charged,” the judge declaimed, “and I hereby sentence you to be strung up by die neck and left strung until you are dead, dead, dead.”

  “And you kin go plumb to hell, hell, hell,” Dingus said.) But then the judge signed the execution order, and a deposition indicating that the said Magee was indeed in the custody of Sheriff C. L. Hoke Birdbill, Yerkey’s Hole, New Mex., and
once the latter had been posted to Santa Fe Hoke received his three thousand dollars. He secured it in a locked strongbox beneath a cot in the smallest unused cell, the cell locked in turn.

  And he began to find his conventional sheriffdom more gratifying then also, what with the abrupt fame that had accrued to it. A San Antonio newspaper, from which he would clip the most commendatory of the several accounts of the sentencing, reposed upon his desk throughout the weeks he awaited the hangman.

  “You’re gonter get it memorized,” the condemned man remarked of Hoke’s attention to the paper, though with his new affluence Hoke had taken to browsing through a St. Louis mail-order catalog with almost equal frequency. Amused, or anyway unperturbed, Dingus lay with his boots off and a sombrero shading his eyes, on the cot within his cell. This was a Thursday night, with the execution finally but two days off.

  “They do word it right pretty,” Hoke acknowledged.

  “But all the reference to that there deadly gun battle,” Dingus speculated from beneath the hat; “you reckon that got wrote up too, I mean previous to this recenter story about the hanging?”

  “I reckon,” Hoke said, not pursuing it.

  “I sure wish we could get holt of that story.”

  “Excepting it wouldn’t do you much good anyways,” Hoke said, “seeing as how you wouldn’t be in a condition to read it except betwixt now and Saturday, unfortunately, being deceased thereafter.”

  “I reckon that’s true enough. But I’d still like to hear tell of that deadly gun battle.”

  “Well, you ain’t gonter, alas.”

  Hoke sat contentedly, less interested for the moment in the subject at hand than in his boots, which he believed he might replace with something in a soft, tooled calf. Meanwhile Dingus remained silent for a time. Then he interrupted Hoke’s reverie to ask, “What you gonter do with all that reward money anyways, Hoke?”