The Ballad of Dingus Magee

by David Markson

“Yes’m,” Turkey repeated.

  And still the woman continued to gaze at him in that odd way. Then her voice changed, however, became almost weary. “You’ll have to help me,” she said.

  “How’s that, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Indeed. Because all this excitement, it’s given me—suddenly, yes. This—this chill. In fact it’s—”

  “Chill?” Turkey said.

  “Ch-ch-chill. Yes. Why, I simply may die on the spot. But if you’ll take my arm, help me back into—”

  “Oh, but ma’am, there’s Dingus, and—”

  So then he had no choice in the matter, since the woman swooned into his arms. Turkey had to carry her inside.

  Thirty minutes later, when he raced to the scene of the fire, he was no more or less immodestly clothed than most of the other townspeople there before him, considering the hour, and even those few who had arrived in relatively substantial attire were already sharing selected garments with the dispossessed prostitutes themselves, a coat here, a shirt there. There was also a prodigality of wholly undraped flesh for Turkey to gape at, in fact, where it bulged and shivered in the fierce light of the blaze. Stark naked, and repudiating any sartorial charity at all, one girl was actually perched screaming atop a hitching rail at die forefront of the crowd, while very near her struggling improbably to disguise a veritable cascade of stomachs with nothing more abundant than a kerchief, an elderly man was shouting hysterically also. Someone identified him as the town mayor. “Our major industry!” he cried. “The foremost attraction of Yerkey’s Hole, wiped away in one fell swoop!”

  Because it was the bordello, of course, Belle’s, blazing like the tinder box it was. The heat was terrific, but no less so than the light itself which flooded the onlookers as, moments before, it had flooded the very bedroom where Turkey had been pacing incredulously, a hand clapped to his skull. “Defenseless?” he had been crying. “Ruined? Aw now, lady, it weren’t me dragged us in here tearing off her clothes and mine too like tonight were the first time in your life you ever heard there were such a thing as two folks crawling under the same blankets at the same time fer some other reason than they was both tired, or—married?MARRIED?”

  He had not even learned the woman’s name. He still hadn’t for that matter, although the sudden inundation of near-daylight breaking over them had postponed the need to temporarily, had thrown even that calamitous insanity into abeyance. Because even she, the deranged horse-faced creature with the abused curl papers in her colorless hair, had become alarmed then, or curious anyway at the sudden furor in the streets, the commotion. No one had been hurt, evidently, it had started upstairs at the rear, and the main stairway had remained unobstructed for a while. But no one seemed to know its origin either. Flames flickered and hissed among the angular roofs, and within the structure itself the holocaust appeared absolute. “But every stitch!” a whore was wailing. “Every stitch a girl owns!”

  “Don’t fret youself none, honey,” a miner reassured her. “You could always come bed down under the sluice with me and the boys.”

  So he was more distracted than ever when he finally discovered the doctor, still in his own nightshirt and prancing excitedly at the periphery of the crowd. “Lissen,” Turkey cried, clutching at the man’s flannel sleeve, pulling him even further aside, ‘Svhat happened? What happened? How did it—?”

  “Don’t know,” the doctor pronounced almost gaily. “But she’s a spit-sizzling sweetheart, ain’t she? Purtiest durned fire I seen since—”

  “Oh thunderation, not that!” Turkey protested. “Who gives a Chinaman’s lob about some dumb old fire? I mean before, with Dingus and Hoke Birdsill, when they done what you said they wasn’t never gonter do and I said they was, and then they—”

  “Who said they never?” The doctor turned to eye him indignantly. “Why, I could of told you right from the start, it were gonter be jest as spectacular as—”

  “But—”

  “Yep. Matter of fact I don’t reckon there’s ever been one solitary episode in the whole history of human heroism kin compare with it. Why, the way Dingus jest kept on acoming, letting Hoke git in all them first shots, too, and not firing hisself even when Hoke put one bullet clear through the brim of his hat, and then a next one smack across the fringe of his vest, but jest asmiling that there confident, lion-hearted smile until he finally got on up close enough to lift that shotgun where he knew he weren’t gonter miss, and then he—”

  “Redone—?”

  “Why, sure. And where was you, you didn’t see it? Ain’t you the eagle-eye weren’t gonter miss a trick?”

  “Well, I dint. I mean I were right out there, no more’n forty feet away neither, or at least I were until I got somewhat indulged elsewhere. But it sure dint strike me as near light enough to never see nobody smile, let alone take notice of no bullet hole in a—”

  “Well, I reckon you jest ain’t very special in the eyesight category, son. Because I witnessed the whole event clear as well water myself, from down there in front’n my office, and—”

  “Your office? But I were ten times closer’n that, and—”

  So Turkey was gawking in consternation, even beginning to itch from it symptomatically, when a girl suddenly cut them off with a scream from somewhere beyond his vision. “Belie! I don’t see Belle! Oh, glory be! And it must of commenced up there in her private boudoir likewise. You don’t think—”

  “Aw, Belle ain’t in there neither. I seed her go tearing off in a surrey, jest a short spell after all that gun fracas took place—”

  “Yair, her and one of the girls, whipping them mares like the tax collector hisself were right back of ‘em, too—”

  “But where—?”

  Turkey lost the rest of it in the swell of the crowd, but he could not have been less interested anyway, still dumbly confronting the doctor. “But what come then?” he cried finally. “All right, let’s jest skip the durned shooting part of it fer now, I mean after. Who got—?”

  “Well, that’s the only aspect ain’t too definite,” the doctor admitted. “But the way I calculate it, it looks like they both must of got punctured pretty severe, since—”

  “What? Both? Dingus got—”

  “Well, that’s jest theory for the moment, son, because ain’t nobody seen ass nor elbow of ‘em since. But what they done, they both sort of faded away, into these convenient alleys after the actual disagreement come to a halt, you see. So I don’t doubt but where they was headed, they was crawling off somewhere to hunt up separate holes to die in, which a wounded feller’ll do, ‘times, if’n he comprehends it’s hopeless.”

  “But—” Turkey had to struggle to keep from shouting at the man now, clutching at his nightshirt again. “Now lissen,” he sobbed, “jest lissen. How come you don’t know no more’n that about it, if’n you claim you saw so durned much of the rest? You ask me, I think you’re plumb so full of bullshit your eyes are brown, is what I think, because—”

  “Now what reason would I have fer telling fibs?” the doctor asked reasonably. “Of course, ain’t neither one of’em dead in any except the ordinary sense, on the other hand. What I mean, this were their mortal demises, nacherly, but in another way, a brace of gallant, romantic figures like that, especially that Dingus, why he’s gonter live on in folks’s recollections for just years and years. You might even put it that he belongs to the ages now, like that Henry Wadsworth Longfeller feller, died last year, or General Custer hisself, or—”

  Turkey’s jaw hung as if ill-hinged. “Doc, lissen, you feel all right?”

  “Why not, son? Truth is, it ain’t every day in a impoverished old man’s career he gets to shed hisself of one unsuccessful line of work and enter into a whole new occupation altogether, I reckon.”

  “A whole new—”

  “Yep. Gonter start me up a Wild West traveling show, sort of like that one of Will Cody’s I were mentioning. Because you take yourself now, you’re jest a average sort of citizen, wouldn’
t you claim? And you would of paid, oh, maybe a cash dollar or two to get the true facts of such a historical occasion, wouldn’t you? Matter of fact that’s how the whole thing come to me, jest after you skedaddled on out’n my office, from when I got to cogitating on how you was so all-fired anxious and all. Now of course it’s jest downright fool’s luck I happen to be the only living soul’s got the gen-u-ine, authentic, eyewitness details, but since it done befell that way I reckon I might as well get me a flat-bottom wagon, and a couple o’ actor fellers, and—” The doctor interrupted himself, glancing beyond Turkey. “Why, howdy there, Miss Pfeffer, glad to see you’re all recuperated again. You heard tell of all the deathless goings-on, I reckon—”

  So Turkey saw her again then too, abruptly forgetting not only the doctor for the moment but even his despair over Dingus himself, itching more violently than ever. She approached quite decorously, however, almost sedate now. “Good evening again yourself, Doctor Fell,” she remarked pleasantly. “Yes, a wretched conflagration, isn’t it? By the way, I wonder if perchance you’ve spied the preacher anywhere in the throng?”

  “Spied the—” Turkey swallowed dismally. “Oh, now look, ma’am, I already done informed you at least ten times, I ain’t but only nineteen years old. And on top of which I—”

  So it was a moment before he noticed the gun. It was tiny, a Derringer, but more than adequately persuasive, and he realized too that his own body concealed it from the doctor, or from anyone else. It did not waver, did not falter once as she pressed it cold against his navel where a button was long since missing from his woolens.

  “Oh, we was right fond chums fer years,” the doctor’s voice came obliquely then, from where he had accosted someone else in the crowd. “Real misunderstood lad he were too, sort of a modern nineteenth-century Prince Robin Hood, if’n the facts were knowed. But say, you don’t happen to call to mind nobody looking for employment maybe, say some feller round about Hoke Birdsill’s heft and build?”

  All of which left Turkey Doolan no solace but to further indulge his infested scalp where he stood, wondering in considerably more bewilderment than ever now, just what, after all, had happened, and precisely how, since a good deal unquestionably had, or so it most certainly seemed, while the main roof of Belle’s place collapsed in a roar across the street behind them.

  “Call me Agnes, why don’t you?” the woman suggested.

  7

  “A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?”

  Tombstone of Sam Bass, Round Rock, Texas

  Meanwhile, back at the bordello, for some time before the fire Hoke Birdsill had been remarkably confused himself. He had not heard the early shotgun blast which indicated that Dingus was escaping from jail, nor did he hear the preacher, Rowbottom, verifying the accomplishment. Once he had been confronted by Belle’s protestations of abiding devotion, and her proposal of marriage, sense of the inescapable had clouded Hoke’s mind like mist.

  So he probably did not realize either, when he finally awoke, that he had fainted. He was still in Belle’s bedroom, but he had no notion whatsoever of the time. And why was he undressed, stripped to his woolens? What made his jaw ache is it did?

  Hoke could only moan, feeding upon his own malaise. And it was about to get worse, since there remained the rest of it to be remembered now also, the incredible climax of his visit to Miss Pfeffer’s, his subsequent meeting with Anna Hot Water in the street. “Three?”he asked himself miserably. “Three separate catastrophes all scheduled for the same solitary hour?”

  Like some wet, furred beast, Hoke shuddered, burrowing more deeply into Belle’s blankets. He lay with his angular knees drawn up against his chest, his eyes closed. “But maybe I’ll jest up and die,” he speculated hopefully. “Maybe that initial doctor back there in Santa Fe were right that time, and all of them others made a error, and I ain’t got but a few months left. A man could face that much, I reckon.”

  Hoke had ventured only one glance about the room, through a single, heavy-lidded eye, bothered by the lamplight. He had thought himself alone. But gradually now he became aware of sounds behind him, although he did not turn. “Three?” he asked himself again.

  But when the sounds increased, almost as if some heavy object of furniture were being disturbed, Hoke at last rolled from the wall. The light remained insupportable, but one of the girls was in fact moving something, dragging an enormous wardrobe trunk toward Belle’s rear door, or trying to. She was new to the house, or moderately so, since Hoke scarcely recognized her. “Well, howdy do,” she greeted him. “You sure did have yourself a snooze, dint you? Why, you was jest snoring to beat a brass band.”

  Hoke forced himself to sit, if with inordinate effort, then scrubbed at his mustache with the back of a wrist. “What time’s it got to be?” he asked wearily.

  “Jest a mite before midnight, I do believe,” the girl said.

  Hoke gazed blearily at nothing. “You happen to notice my duds around anywheres?”

  “Don’t seem to,” the girl said. Hoke saw now that she was quite young, and fairly appealing also, although somewhat excessively rouged and powdered. Watching him in turn, after a moment she sighed. “Meantimes I jest don’t know how I’m ever gonter get this trunk down those high stairs now,” she told him.

  Hoke scowled, considering it without exuberance himself. The trunk was as large as any he had ever seen, and very much like one of Belle’s. In fact he was almost certain it was hers.

  So then he sobbed. “Don’t tell me she’s already done got readied up for a honeymoon?”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Jest Belle, I reckon,” he said wretchedly. “Excepting what she don’t know is that there’s two other female personages doubtless preparing to do the same thing at the same—”

  “Oh, well, say now, is Belle getting wedded? Truly?” The girl tittered. “And are you the lucky feller? Why, I declare, if’n that ain’t jest the wonderfulest thing!”

  This time Hoke could only groan.

  “Except I wouldn’t know anything about Belle’s own packing,” the girl went on then. “But concerning the trunk, well, Belle said I could borrow that. It’s my poor aged mother who’s pitifiil ill, you see, back home in Texarkana. I jest got the sad news tonight, from a wayfaring stranger who did the kindness of carrying the letter, and I have to hasten to her bedside. I’ve got a buckboard all prepared down below, too, but I jest can’t fathom how I’m gonter get it loaded, I mean all by my helpless self, and—”

  “Huh?” Hoke finally roused himself from his stupor. “Oh. Oh, yair.” He got to his feet. “You’ll pardon my woo-lies, I reckon. But I’m still durned if’n I kin recollect what happened to my duds.”

  But for that matter he was unable to remember having undressed either, on top of which his jaw did seem injured now at that. Rubbing it, and troubled by a persistent sense of disjunction, Hoke hestitated briefly. Then, with a shrug, he bent to the trunk.

  Hoke blanched. “Whatcha got in there,” he asked, “Belle’s table silver?” It took virtually all of his strength to jerk it into the doorway.

  The girl averted her face with a giggle. “Oh, you know the way a female does collect pretty things, like frilly drawers and such—”

  Hoke shook his head. “Well,” he breathed. But at least he could see the buckboard hitched and accessible in the yard below. “I’m gonter have to bounce her some, going down.”

  “Why, I think you’re doing right heroically—”

  She waltzed down ahead of him while he coped with it as well as possible, which meant assaying no more than a step at a time and having to rest after each. He managed with an extravagant final effort to shoulder it onto the rear rack of the buckboard itself, however, although for an instant it teetered precariously when his knees threatened to give. Hoke staggered against the back wheel, panting.

  So he was by no means fully recovered when the pistol shot cracked somewhere in the distance, although it was not merely fatigue which
kept the sound from interesting him particularly. Rather it was the girl herself, only that moment mounting the wagon and suddenly, startlingly, presenting Hoke with a spectacular new perspective on her appearance. Viewed from below, massive and pillowlike, her bosom was little short of astounding.

  But when a second shot followed, and quickly after that a third, even Hoke found himself disturbed. “Oh, dear me, then they truly are having that dreadful gun battle after all,” the girl exclaimed. “Why, it almost makes a lass happy she’s leaving, when—”

  “Gunfight?” Hoke frowned. “Now who would be—?”

  So then a new explosion cut him off, this time the roar of a shotgun instead of a pistol, or so it appeared from the booming echo that slithered and clapped about the town.

  Yet Hoke’s attention reverted to that improbable bosom once more despite all, drawn there this time by the girl herself as she pressed a hand to it in concern. “But surely you heard the announcement? Heavens jest about every soul in the house ran on out seeking sheltered locations to watch it from. Because it’s that wicked desperado, Dingus Billy Magee, and—”

  “Dingus?” Hoke raised his chin skeptically. “Shucks now, must of been somebody pulling your leg, Miss, since Dingus is locked up over to the—”

  “Oh, yes,” the girl insisted. “Dingus William Magee himself. And the other one is the sheriff of the town, Mr. Broad-bill. Mr. Birdsoak? I’ve never had the opportunity to make the gentleman’s acquaintance myself, unfortunately, but I’m certain he’s involved also. Yes, positively. Dingus William Magee and Sheriff Birddripping.”

  “Dingus and—” But Hoke decided there was no point in attempting to explain, since it was obviously some sort of joke. And the girl was seated now anyway, adjusting the reins. “Well,” she said, “I’d sure like to hear how it come out, but my poor aged mother is doubtless sobbing my name even as I dawdle. But I jest don’t know what I’d of done without your gallant and manly help, sir.”

  “Oh, weren’t nothing—”