That was something less than half a year ago. At first Dingus had been more confused than dismayed, but the confusion had stemmed from just the fact that there was no dismay. So it took him only a few days to realize that he had actually ceased to think about Drucilla a good while before. All he really cared about was that safe.
Nor was it the money either, the sixty or eighty thousand dollars which might surprise him by being considerably more than that. It was principle. Yet he did not rush back to it, on the premise that man cannot rush destiny anyway. Instead, he dropped hints and promoted rumors until some four thousand five hundred dollars in new rewards had accrued to his name. And even then he thought of this as mere exercise, as a sort of renewed apprenticeship before the ultimate, irreproachably professional enterprise of the safe itself.
But it amused him to wait, also, since it further enhanced the mood of anticipation. Deliberately he set out on a long, aimless journey into Old Mexico, where he had never been, to prolong it.
So then in Chihuahua he caught dysentery, a case so extreme that it not only postponed his return to Yerkey’s Hole for some months, but precluded mobility of any sort in the interim. “Less’n I want to leave a trail clear across the territory that even a old stuff-nosed mule-sniffer like Hoke Birdsill couldn’t miss,” he said.
Then, when he did return to New Mexico, the first thing he discovered was that the bounty on his head had mysteriously more than doubled, in major part because of a posting by something called the Fairweather Transportation Company, of which Dingus could have sworn he’d never heard. “But maybe I ought to get to it at that,” he decided, “ifn they even made it a criminal offense when I shit now.” He was some two weeks’ distance from Yerkey’s Hole when he picked up an innocuously moronic drifter named Turkey Doolan and headed west.
He had no attack in mind, only an abiding, bemused sense of confidence, as if the entire project were now less a matter of premeditation than of ordination, of fate itself. And even when Hoke Birdsill turned out to be as irascible as ever, not only banging Turkey Doolan from the saddle but wounding Dingus himself, Dingus remained merrily undaunted.
So he was still laughing, still delighted with the world he had merely put off conquering until tomorrow, when he took time out to deceive a drab, horse-faced woman named Agnes Pfeffer.
“Well, anyways,” he rationalized some few hours later, “at least it were a nostalgic sort of error, since I’m darned if’n she dint remind me jest a trifle of both Miss Grimshaw and Miss Youngblood theirselves.”
So it wasn’t Hoke Birdsill he was angry with tonight when he awoke in the bleak, familiar cell, of course, it was his own irresponsibility. Because he actually believed the conclusion he was to reach once Hoke left him alone to brood over his new incarceration. “That’s it, sure as outhouses draw flies,” he declared in resignation, fingering the swelling lump behind his ear. “A feller has to face life without a mother to guide him, he’s jest nacherly doomed to tickle the wrong titty, ‘times.”
Nor would there be any solution quite so simple as talking his way into a fake escape this time, Dingus knew. In fact Hoke seemed determined to give him no opportunity to talk about anything at all, since it had been well before ten o’clock when he departed, voicing his intention to look in on the indisposed Miss Pfeffer, and now at eleven there was still no sign of him. Although perhaps it was not quite eleven at that, since Dingus still made use of the old, engraved watch of his father’s which cousin Magee had given him, and it had long ago ceased to be reliable. “But jest the fact that I keep it proves I’m downright sentimental at heart,” he mused, “which shows all the more how I would of surely paid dutiful heed to a mother’s advice.”
Meanwhile the confinement had already begun to annoy him physically, albeit mainly because he was still unable to sit. He had dressed himself, once Hoke had removed the handcuffs, but he had been pacing restlessly ever since. On top of which it hurt where Hoke had bushwhacked him in Miss Pfeffer’s bed.
So he was still pacing when the woman, the squaw he had met earlier, came striding suddenly into the empty main room of the jail. And for a moment, preoccupied, Dingus did not even recognize her. Then he literally bounded toward the bars. Because she was still carrying his shotgun.
“Hey!” he cried, glancing to the door to make certain she was alone at the same time. “Howdy there! Remember me? From that there gun, when—”
But she ignored his interests completely, scowling in a preoccupation of her own. “Where that loose-button son-um-beetch?” she asked. “I decide never damn mind midnight, he marry up with me right now I think, hey?”
Dingus could scarcely recall what she was talking about, if he even fully knew. “Yeah, sure, anything you say,” he told her anxiously. “But lissen, that gun—it’s mine, remember? From out by that wagon, I give it to you. But it were only a loan, you understand? And now I need—”
She finally paused to consider him. “Oh, is you, hey? How you feel now, you still in bum shape? How come you in there anyways, yes?”
“Howdy, howdy, yair, I feel jest fine,” Dingus dismissed it, “but never mind that now, let’s—” She was holding the weapon inattentively, one finger through its trigger guard, and Dingus strained as if attempting to will her toward him. “Come on, now,” he pleaded. “I jest couldn’t carry it before, being hurt and such, but now I need it urgent again. Look, you got to—”
So then she was paying him no regard at all once more, clomping across to glance briefly into the back room, and then considering the desk. “He don’t come back here yet, hey? Not since I see him up there, suck round that pale-rump teacher-lady place?”
“Oh, look, look, I don’t know nothing about that—”
Dingus’ voice was rising, becoming mildly hysterical. “Ma’am—Miss Hot Water, ain’t that it?—look, please now, you jest got to give me that gun back. And before nobody else comes along neither, or it’ll be too—say, here, look, I’ll even buy it from you, I’ll give you…” He was fumbling anxiously in his pockets, then desperately. He had been carrying several silver dollars when he had undressed at Miss Pfeffer’s. His pockets were empty. “Oh, that unscrupulous, self-abusing old goat, even thieving from a unconscious prisoner, I’ll—aw, lady, please now, give me the—”
“You a pretty young feller be in hoosegow. What your names anyway, hey?”
“Dingus,” he sobbed absurdly. “Look, lady—ma’am—I jest got to have my—”
But Anna Hot Water was suddenly frowning, tilting her rhombic blunt head. “Dingus?” she said. She mouthed it slowly, in part with its common pronunciation but with overtones of the way it was enunciated by Indians or Mexicans. Then she said it again, wholly now in the second manner. “Dean Goose?”
Then something began to happen to Anna Hot Water. Her mouth was slack, and her eyes turned cloudy. For a long moment, while Dingus agonized over the shotgun, one arm actually stretching helplessly through the bars toward it now, stroking air, she seemed to be in agony herself, in an ordeal of what might have been attempted thought. Then he saw her begin to grasp it, whatever it was. Her eyes widened and widened.
“Dean Goose?” she repeated tentatively. “Feller stop one time up to Injun camp near Fronteras? Feller take on seventeen squaws in twenty hours nonstop and squish the belly-button out’n every damn one? Dean Goose? You that Dean Goose feller?”
“Well, yair now,” Dingus stated, “I reckon I been through Fronteras, but what’s—”
But he did not get to finish, because the rest of it happened so quickly then, and was so inexplicable, that for an instant he was totally at a loss. In fact for the first firaction of the instant he was terrified also, since he thought the shotgun was being aimed at himself. So he was actually leaping aside, sucking in what he believed might well be his last breath, when the gun roared, although by the time she had cast it away and flung the smashed cell door inward he had already realized, had understood that her aim had been true if still comprehending littl
e else. Her face was radiant. She tore at her clothes.
“Dean Goose!” she cried. “Dean Goose for real, greatest bim-bam there is! Never mind that floppy-dong old Hoke Birdsill, oh you betcha! Come to Anna Hot Water, oh my Dean Goose lover!”
He felt his bandage tear loose as he vaulted Hoke’s desk. He had to sprint the width of the town before he was certain he had lost her.
He broke stride once, dodging behind Miss Pfeffer’s house to snatch up a fistful of the revolvers he had deposited there earlier, but she was still close enough behind him at that juncture that he had to leave his holster belts in the entangled sage, along with his Winchester. He ran on with the Colts clattering inside his shirt.
When he had finally drawn clear, he found that he had stopped not far from the dilapidated miners’ shacks he had seen before. In fact the lamp still burned in the one where he had come upon Brother Rowbottom, the dubious preacher. It took him time to catch his breath, especially since consideration of the manner of his deliverance had set him to laughing again, but eventually he limped back over there.
The man himself still sat amid the disheveled shacks as if having scarcely moved in the several hours except perhaps to raise the whiskey jug, which was wedged between his bony knees at the moment. He wore the same disreputable woolens, and the fight reflected dimly from his hairless lumpy skull. His empty left sleeve had become wound around his neck, draped there.
He did not appear thoroughly drunk, however, and he eyed Dingus quizzically. “So you come on back, eh? Heard the call of the Lord’s need after all, did you?”
“I were jest passing the vicinity,” Dingus replied. “IPn you’ll excuse the intrusion, I’ll make use out’n your lamp.” Not waiting for an answer (none was forthcoming anyway) Dingus set aside his weapons and then lowered his pants, twisting about to inspect the dressing. He had bled again, but not significantly. Watching him, or perhaps not, the man, Rowbottom, belched expressively.
“I reckon you’d better give me that damn dollar,” he decided then, as Dingus readjusted the bandage. “The Lord don’t cotton to critters repudiating His wants two times in the same night.”
But Dingus was not really listening. Because if he could afford to be safely amused again, it also struck him as time to turn serious about certain matters. “I reckon I’d best at that,” he told himself, “afore I wind up too pooped out for even simple stealing.” He fastened his belt, wondering if Hoke Birdsill had heard the shotgun.
“So do I get the lousy dollar or don’t I?” the preacher wanted to know.
Dingus reached absently into a pocket, then into a second one before recalling that Hoke had emptied them. But at the same time the first remote intimation of an idea was crossing his mind. He lifted his face to meet Rowbottom’s flat, oddly refractive eyes.
“You shy of cash money pretty bad, are you?” he asked then.
“The Lord’s work ain’t never terminated,” the man said.
“Tell you the truth now, I weren’t rightly thinking about His’n,” Dingus said, still pensive. “You got any sort of scheme in your head, maybe, about how a feller might go about getting a certain local business establishment empty of folks fer a brief spell? Like say a certain whorehouse—if’n you’ll pardon the term?”
“Women flesh runs a’rampant,” the man shrugged. “I been trying my best. But you drive ‘em out one door, they jest hies their abominations back through the nearest winder.”
But now Dingus was attending more to the tone of the man’s voice, its resonance, than to the content of his speech. “I dint mean preaching,” he explained. “You reckon folks’d hear you from a fair piece, if’n you had a sort of public announcement to make—say a announcement worth maybe twenty cash dollars?”
The preacher had been raising the jug. He dropped it as if struck. “Brother, leave us not bandy words. For twenty dollars cash currency I would hang by my only thumb at Calvary itself, hind side to.”
“Never mind getting no horse soldiers involved,” Dingus said. He retrieved the oldest of his Colts, hefting it momentarily. Then he tossed it pointedly onto the shuck mattress.
So then the preacher sat absolutely without movement, staring at the weapon, for perhaps ten seconds. “Fifty dollars,” he proclaimed finally. “The Lord couldn’t condone mayhem for less.”
“Ain’t mayhem neither,” Dingus said. “That there’s your pay. Twenty-two dollars, more like, standard saloon pawning price on the model.”
So the preacher inspected it then, trying the hammer gingerly several times. Then it disappeared all but miraculously beneath the shucks, as the man himself arose and stepped decisively toward the peg from which his clothes were hung. “The Lord’s will be done,” he intoned.
Dingus considered his antiquated watch as the man dressed. It was approximately eleven-thirty.
“Starting in jest about fifteen minutes from now,” he said, “all up and down the main street, but most especially up to Belle’s. Loud as you kin call it out, I want you to inform folks that Dingus Billy Magee done escaped jail again. And that he’s putting it to Hoke Birdsill to meet him fer a pistol shoot.” Dingus thought a moment. “Yair. Pronounce it fer out front of the jailhouse, at midnight sharp.”
Brother Rowbottom could not have been more unimpressed. “Feller name of Dingus Freddie Magee has got escaped again,” he repeated without emphasis, “and he hereby challenges Hoke Birdbelly to a fight with hoglegs, front of the jail come midnight. That the entirety of it?”
Dingus nodded, still contemplative. “But you pronounce it jest afore twelve up to Belle’s, that’s the crucial part. Folks’d be more interested in the chance they could see a bloody murder, than in jest some common everyday one-dollar poontang, don’t you reckon?”
“Ain’t mine to judge,” the preacher said. “The Lord sends me His missions in devious ways. You plumb sure I kin get twenty-two dollars on that Peacemaker single-action? Firing pin’s a mite wore, there.”
“You don’t,” Dingus said, “and somewhat later’n midnight I’ll give you payment for it myself—in dust gold or minted silver or paper currency or any other form you so desire.”
The preacher eyed him opaquely, buttoning a threadbare frock coat. Then he belched again.
“Amen,” Dingus said.
“So you’re a lamb of the Lord after all, eh?”
“Jest insofar as nature is concerned,” Dingus said. “Trees and clouds and such, sort of transcendental.”
So this time the preacher broke wind. “Emersonian horse pee,” he grunted.
But Dingus had already closed his eyes, leaning against the wall until he heard the man depart. Then, fingering the most recent bullet hole in his trustworthy vest, and with his young brow furrowed from the gravity of it all, he commenced to devise the remainder of his strategy.
“So even if’n I never had no mother at that,” he remarked aloud, “ain’t nobody gonter be able to say Dingus Billy Magee dint truly apply his talents in this life, after all.”
The Ballad of Dingus Magee Page 11