The Ballad of Dingus Magee

by David Markson

  “Yes’m?”

  “Oh, heavens, would you think me shameless if I—”

  “Oh, ma’am, I couldn’t think badly of a well-bred lady like yourself, no matter what.”

  “Well, it’s—the only cure for a chill like this, is—oh, forgive me, but I’m certain you’ll understand, in such emergency, if you c-c-could—”

  “Miss Pfeffer! You want me to—?”

  “It will be my death if you don’t, I truly fear it will—”

  “Oh,” Hoke said. “Oh! You wait, then. I jest got to git out’n my—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Birdsill. Oh, thank you. I feel warmer already, I truly do. But—dear heavens, this is so compromising, I hope you don’t think—”

  “Oh, no ma’am, I wouldn’t never—”

  “But—”

  “Yes’m?”

  “Isn’t this the way people would—I mean married folk, of course—somewhat in this same manner, although with a certain arrangement, like—”

  “Miss Pfeffer, ma’am?”

  “And then like—”

  “Miss Pfeffer!”

  “Oh, dear,” Miss Pfeffer said. “Oh, dear. And now the chill has come back, just dreadfully, dreadfully! Why, it’s so bad, I don’t believe I’ll be able to stop shivering for anything at all—”

  “Married?” Hoke cried. “Married! But—”

  “Because I’m ruined, ruined!” Miss Pfeffer was weeping hysterically. “Oh dear, dear, how could you do this to me? A poor, defenseless girl like myself, trusting you, looking to you for protection in my moment of need—”

  “But Miss Pfeffer, it weren’t me who started the—”

  “Oh, what have you done! Taking advantage of me when I was helpless, helpless! You’ll have to many me. If you don’t, I’ll—”

  “But Miss Pfeffer!” Hoke was fumbling for his trousers, swallowing hard. “But—”

  “Stained, my honor stained forever! My virtue lost—”

  “Please,” Hoke pleaded, “Miss Pfeffer, get aholt of yourself. It weren’t nothing more than—”

  “I’ll kill myself—”

  “Huh?”

  “If you don’t make an honest woman out of me, I will! I must! There’s no other salvation, none! And my blood will be on your hands, Mr. Birdsill!”

  “But Miss Pfeffer, ma’am, I know I been courting you and such, but it weren’t for—I mean I jest couldn’t afford to go to Belle’s too often, but now I already done got what I—I mean…”

  Miss Pfeffer wailed in the darkness. “With a gun!” she cried. “I’ll get a gun, and I’ll put a bullet into my heart. Two bullets. Six! On your doorstep, Mr. Birdsill, for all the world to know who wronged me—”

  “But I got to have some time, I…”

  “Time?” Miss Pfeffer’s voice changed abruptly, and again Hoke felt that she was eyeing him strangely. “How much time?” she asked him.

  Hoke struggled with it. “A year?”

  Miss Pfeffer wailed.

  “A month, then?” Hoke ventured.

  “Midnight,” Miss Pfeffer declared.

  “Midnight?”

  “Midnight,” she repeated. “It is now approximately ten o’clock. If you don’t come to me with a man of the cloth by midnight, you will find my mortal remains upon the doorstep of the jail.”

  “A man of the—?” Hoke’s head was swimming.

  “Until then, Mr. Birdsill.”

  “But—”

  He stumbled out, gathering his hat and coat mindlessly as he went. He was muttering to himself, all the way into the dark street, so he did not see the shotgun until it loomed beneath his very nose.

  “Okay, you son-um-beetch,” she said, “is no damn lie then, hey?”

  “Huh?” Hoke had sprung back instinctively, his hands shooting up. He dropped his jacket. “Now blast it all, ain’t I got enough troubles of my own without—”

  But the enormous weapon was pressing against his chest now. “You make bim-bam with that horsy paleface, you son-um-beetch? Is true what I hear, hey?”

  “Now who ever went and told you such a lie? And where’d you get holt of a shotgun like—”

  “Never mind where I hear. Never mind shotgun neither. You try to get married up with that horsy twat or no, yes hey?”

  “Aw now, Anna…”

  “Stick up your damn hands again, you son-um-beetch.”

  “Now lissen here, I got things to do. There’s a dangerous desperado over there in jail I got to keep track of. And on top of that I—”

  “You keep track that one-arm feller instead, I think. I think you forget everything damn else, go find him pretty damn quick.”

  “One-armed feller? Find him for what? You mean that crazy preacher?”

  “Preacher feller, oh yes, hey. I give you one hour, maybe two. Then damn quick you marry me, never mind that paleface bim-bam. I give you until midnight is damn all.”

  “Midnight?”

  “Midnight,” Anna Hot Water said. “Oh yes, hey. Otherwise I blow you apart from nuts to mustache, you son-um-beetch!”

  She left him there, trailing her stench behind her.

  He did not go back to the jail. In fact he would not have been able to say where he went at first, pacing the streets dismally. “And I can’t even jest saddle up and skedaddle,” he realized, “because I got to get Dingus hanged proper first, if’n I want to collect that new reward money.”

  He stopped at Belle’s. Again he did not know why, except that the house itself, its sheer size, seemed to suggest sanctuary. In the main saloon he gulped several whiskeys, to no avail, however. He did not see Belle herself. People accosted him to ask about the new capture, but he scarcely heard what he told them. An image of Anna Hot Water’s oiled flat head hovered before his eyes. When he squeezed them shut Miss Pfeffer’s blunt, mare-like features replaced it. He saw himself surrounded by whimpering infants, all girls, all with mouse-colored, curl-papered hair.

  So when he found that he had climbed to the door of Belle’s office bedroom, standing indecisively but with a hand raised to knock, he still could not have said precisely what he had in mind. He had exchanged hardly a dozen words with Belle in six months. She took a moment to open, then appeared fastening a sleeveless robe about her waist. Muscles rippled in her blacksmith’s arms, and she raised an eyebrow dubiously.

  “Well,” she told him, “so you’re a big hombre again, are you? How much do you get that he can connive you out of this time—ten thousand almost, ain’t it? What’s on your alleged mind, Birdsill—you got some business, or do you think your new bank account makes us social equals who just ought to chat for a spell?”

  But he wasn’t really listening. So maybe it was the familiar bed behind her, the sheer enormity of that too, which had unconsciously drawn him. But the whole room itself, in the dim glow of a single lamp at the desk, intimated safety, security. Hoke knew the solution then. Because she could hide him here easily, certainly until his money arrived. “I’ll pay you,” he said. “I won’t be too long, it’s jest from Santa Fe. I’ll give you five hundred dollars. And—”

  “What?” Belle eyed him askance. “You’ll give me—”

  “Five,” Hoke said. “All right, never mind. A thousand. But that’s as high as I kin go. All I want is a few days, and…”

  “Well, I’m damned,” Belle said. “You mean to say—because I’ve been offered twenty in my time, and once fifty, too, but that doesn’t count since the varmint didn’t have the cash to start with. But this is—”

  “No,” Hoke said. “You got the wrong idea, I jest mean—”

  But Hoke did not get to explain. Because what suddenly happened then, what was already starting to happen even as he spoke, could not possibly have astonished or confused him more. Belle Nops abruptly swallowed once, then a second time, standing with one hand lifted to her immemorial bosom. Then the bosom heaved, and her face became contorted, and the swallowing became a series of ragged, inarticulate sobs. “A thousand dollars?” she cho
ked. “A thousand?”

  “Well, yair,” Hoke said, “but I don’t see no reason fer—”

  And then Belle Nops was weeping. Tears flooded down her painted cheeks, beyond any control. “Oh, Birdsill,” she cried, “you mean after six months you’re that desperate? You truly missed me so much that—”

  “Huh?”

  “Never,” she sobbed, “never! No man has ever cared that much before. And to think that I made you suffer so long, let your heart break for all this time!”

  So now it was Hoke who had commenced to swallow, clutching his derby and stumbling backward against the door. “But—”

  Moaning, her incredible bosom rising and falling, she lurched after him. Her eyes were wet, they gleamed. “A thousand dollars! In thirty-nine long years, never once have I been so deeply touched! Keep your money, keep it! I’m yours for nothing! Because I’ve missed you too! Oh, my sweetie, I’ve pined for you so!”

  Hoke stumbled against a large stuffed chair, going over. “But I jest wanted to stay for—for—”

  “Yes, stay—stay forever! We’ll get married, now, tonight! Because it’s so romantic I could…”

  Hoke did not quite scream.

  “Because I’ve always loved you,” she cried. “From the very beginning!”

  “But—but—all them names you used to call me, every time we—”

  “Oh, you foolish, foolish boy, didn’t you understand? It was because a girl can’t be the one to say it, and you yourself were so blind, so blind! But what does the past matter now? What does anything matter? Oh, to think, at last—Missies Hoke Birdsill! Oh, my own sweetie pie—”

  Flowing open, her robe enveloped him. The astonishing bosom unfurled like gonfalons loosed, like melons in dehiscence. But Hoke saw not, partook not. He had already fainted.

  5

  “We were drove to it, sir.”

  Cole Younger

  At times like these, Dingus had to wonder where he had gone astray. “You old mule-sniffer,” he asked himself thoughtfully, alone in the jail, “jest what is it, anyway, makes you so bad?”

  But he believed he knew, really. “It’s because I never had me a mother,” he decided, “to guide me onto the correct paths of life.”

  For that matter he had never had a father either, or not for long, nor was his name actually Magee. He had been born William Dilinghaus but he had not been able to pronounce that, not when he was first old enough to understand that something else went with the Billy, and Dingus had been the result when he tried. Magee was a cousin. “You might as well call yourself whatever suits your liking,” he had told the boy. “Because there ain’t nothing else gonter come easy in this world, and that’s the gospel.”

  On the other hand he did believe he remembered his father faintly, a short, pink-lidded man with hunched shoulders and gone prematurely to fat, and would dream of him from time to time. In the dream his father was ways sitting at a table, dealing cards. Then his head would jerk upright suddenly, as if worked by a bit between his jaws, and a small reddening hole would appear in the center of his forehead.

  The cousin denied that Dingus could recall any such thing. “Because you was too young,” he insisted. “Lissen, you weren’t but two when I got the letter from that there peace officer and went rushing up the width of two states to claim you. So you jest must of heard me discoursing on the subject thereafter, is all.”

  What happened was this. His father had, in fact, been a gambler, although less than remarkably adept at his profession evidently, since the shooting Dingus thought he remembered, also an actual occurrence, had taken place after a particularly remunerative poker hand the man had won with three aces, two of which were unfortunately noticed to belong to the same suit. This was on a Mississippi steamboat, just north of Natchez. Deckhands were already in the process of weighting down the body, preparatory to depositing it over a rail, when the sound of a baby crying reminded someone that Dilinghaus had not come aboard alone. They found the boy in a lifeboat, teething on several additional mismatched high-denomination cards.

  But there was no sign of any mother, on ship or when it docked either, nor did anything in the dead man’s possessions allude to a wife. Indeed, the possessions themselves were few. Dilinghaus had left a cheap gold watch which bore an inscription (obviously a pun of sorts on his name, although of no help to the Natchez constabulary: To my darling Ding, he rings the bell) and a carpetbag containing unwashed laundry and more of the ill-served high cards. The local sheriff did find a letter in the bag, however, addressed to Dilinghaus in care of the steamboat line at Memphis, and wholly concerned with a debt of some thirty dollars owed by the deceased to one Floyd K. Magee of San Antonio. The sheriff wrote to Magee, explaining the situation and requesting any assistance and/or information the man might be able to provide.

  Three weeks passed before Magee replied, admitting to an obscure relationship with Dilinghaus and authorizing them to send the child, after which the sheriff had to write a second time asking for the fare, and in the interim the boy was being kept in the local jail. But the jailer was a confirmed bachelor, and the sheriff had lost his own childless wife a decade before. They were practical men; after two days the pair of them had marched into the nearest brothel and picked the first whore in sight and arrested her.

  She was relatively young, and she did not really seem to mind, but when three more weeks elapsed before Magee next told them to wait, that he would be there eventually in person, she finally said, “Look, it ain’t living in a cell, and it ain’t the kid neither, even though he does crap up his bottom faster’n I can keep count. But I’ve got six of my own up to Vicksburg, you understand? And there’s my old drunk dad to support on top of that.”

  So they waited another day and then they solved that too, simply by moving the jailer himself into a cell and giving the woman the rear room in which he normally lived. (The room had a private entrance, and the neighboring madam cooperated by shunting certain of her clients through a back alley from the brothel. Meanwhile the woman had contrived a cradle by filling a drawer from the sheriff’s desk with unginned cotton, and when necessary she simply replaced the drawer in the desk, removing the one above it for ventilation.) As a matter of fact they had become fixtures in the place, whore and orphan both, long before Magee finally did arrive. “It almost seems a shame,” the woman commented at least once, “to go and hand him off to that cousin. A child needs a female’s kind of tender looking after.”

  But the cousin felt differently. “I’m his blood kin,” he said, “and I reckon I can do better for him than any prosty.”

  “Yair,” the sheriff said, “and you been right anxious to git around to it, seeing as how it were June when I wrote and now it’s October.”

  “I been busy,” the cousin said.

  He had been, and he continued to be, although five or six years would pass before Dingus understood at what. Where the cousin took him in San Antonio was an impoverished district not far from the ruins of the Alamo. The cousin was in his early thirties then, rheumy and myopic and of solitary habits (a neighboring half breed woman with some dozen youngsters of her own gave him advice or small aid with Dingus when needed). He never sent the boy to school, but he did take time to teach him to read out of an ancient anatomy text, and cope with the rudiments of arithmetic. It developed that the cousin had actually used the text in the study of medicine at one time, and certain of his acquaintances were practicing doctors in fact—several remote, secretive men who would knock on occasion, although never in daylight, and who never entered the shabby house either but would speak briefly and clandestinely with the cousin outside. That was when the cousin would be busy, those same nights. It would take almost until dawn.

  And then one evening the cousin took him along. Dingus was eight then, and Magee did not explain. He said merely, “I reckon it’s time you learned to make somewhat of a living.” Dingus followed him for almost two hours along a road which crossed the length of the town before extending in
to the barren countryside beyond, gradually diminishing to become little more than tamped sand. Then they left the road to enter a once-cultivated but now abandoned field, and at a lightning-gutted hollow tree the cousin told him to wait while he boosted himself up and rooted around within the shell. When the cousin descended again he had two shovels with him, and a bulky folded canvas, apparently once part of the sleeve of a Conestoga wagon, but still he failed to elaborate. “Come on,” was all he said.

  But it was not much farther now, and Dingus had come to realize where they were anyway, had recognized the location if only out of recollected hearsay description and so began to comprehend vaguely some of the reasons for the furtiveness of their mission also, if not yet its specific purpose. When they entered the cemetery itself he began to get frightened. He said so. “Lissen,” the cousin told him, “there ain’t no physical thing on this earth a dead man can do, except wait for the worms to gnaw at him. So in a way we’re doing him a kindness by preventing that. Get to digging, now. The dirt’s easy enough, since it were jest put back this morning.”

  He was right about the latter part of it. They were finished in less than an hour, although the return trip consumed considerably more time than had the journey out. Dingus waited in an alley while the cousin delivered the improvised sack at the doctor’s rear door. The cousin gave him a dollar, which he said was one third of what he himself was paid.

  He went along regularly after that, perhaps once a week and doing more and more of the work as time passed (although he was restricted to digging only; he had always been small for his age, and even at ten could still barely lift, let alone carry). “But you can be grateful you’re learning a trade,” the cousin said, “especially since I been right upset, ‘times, remembering what a unpromising start you had in life, and I weren’t sure a unwedded feller like myself could bring you up Christian and respectable.”

  “I appreciate it,” Dingus said.

  It was around then that it struck him to ask Magee about his mother also, but Magee could tell him nothing. “I never even heard tell your pa had got spliced,” he said. “But you take a incompetent chap who slips a ace out’n his sleeve without he remembers it’s the same ace of diamonds he’s already got in his hand, I don’t reckon he’ll hold onto a wife any longer’n he’s about to hold onto his money. Or his life. But anyways, I done my best to be a mother to you, likewise.”