Ghost Town: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  Well, he’s been thrown off horses before. Breaking broncs is part of who he is, what he does. Or used to be, do, best he can recollect, his memory about this residing mostly at the base of his spine and now freshly jogged. But it’s been awhile. That mustang he rode in here was probably the last one he broke. If he ever really did. Wasn’t easy. It had been living wild and had acquired fixed notions about anybody sitting upon it. Which, not caring to be sat upon himself, he could respect, but only up to the point where it started to hurt. That horse would stand still as stone and then would suddenly unwind like a clock spring, throwing a body every which direction, no two of its feet hitting the grit at the same time. It whirled, sunfished, high-dived, and back-flipped; it was like riding the end of a whip or trying to cling to a cliff face in an earthquake. With the cheeks of your backside. He got bucked into mud holes, cactus patches, manure wagons, and bonfires, once even up a tree. And he got mad. Goddammit, it was either him or the horse. He had himself lashed to the stirrups and saddle with the intention of riding it all day and all night for as long as it took. How long that was he can’t say, but it seemed like a lifetime, a bone-breaking nightmare that would never end. He came to one day at the bottom of a ravine in a pile of brambles, still tied to the busted tack and the horse quietly grazing on the hillside overhead.

  The horse had bested him but they got on after that. Partners of a sort. Neither of them went back to where they’d been; he wouldn’t have known how to find his way back had he wanted to. Instead, they just kept moving, a pair of fiddle-footed ramblers, following the wind, until that drifting brought them out here. To the desert. Where now, somewhere, a coyote yaps and a lone wolf howls. A not too subtle reminder. That he’s meat. And the desert’s dry belly on which he lies is hollow and full of a restless insatiable hunger. Even now he feels that belly rumbling faintly beneath him, hears it: some animal stealthily approaching. He has no weapons, not even his bowie knife, but whatever it is will not get a free meal. He lies deadly still, trying to estimate how far away it is and just where it’s coming from, sniffing the air for a clue, gazing fixedly up at the night sky, wishing it were a mirror. No movement up there tonight, the stars are all nailed in their places, but they are flickering as if they might be loose and could easily fall out. He concentrates on them, as though he might unplug one with his gaze alone. And then, to his startlement (he cries out) he does, or seems to, but it misses his predator and lands on him instead. But: not a star. No. He’s been hit in the face with a boot, his own boot. Standing over him is the black mare. She’s come back. Her coat is wet with sweat and there is foam at the corners of her mouth. She drops the other boot, his hat, his gunbelt, the sheathed knife.

  He lies back, staring up at this giant of a horse above him, her black body blotting out the stars, but her own eyes luminous as moons, and he feels suddenly more attached to the earth than he’s ever felt before. It’s as though the horse, whom he has sorely misjudged, without explaining anything (he’s as ignorant as he ever was), has given him a reason for being, and a desire for it too, and he knows now they will survive this night. She bends down, rubs her broad nose against his, nuzzles his chest as if to encourage him to get on with it. Yes, he knows they have to keep moving, they’ve probably followed her here, but the harmonious view he has of the universe at this moment is so compelling he wants to hold on to it for a moment longer. He feels that he is gazing, gazing up at the horse and the sky, upon truth itself, the core and essence of it. Ineffable of course, like the smelly old fellow said, aghast at what he saw, but his heart, his most unexercised organ, is touched. He reaches up in gratitude to stroke the mare’s neck, but she flinches and jerks back. What—? Blood! She’s been wounded! They’ve shot at her, those vicious yellow-livered cab-bageheads! The rage that wells up in him serves a purpose: it stirs him to sit up and don the gunbelt and the other things she’s brought him. He’s ready to take them all on! She watches patiently, nosing the ground as if to graze there, though there’s nothing to eat. The boots are the hardest. He doesn’t bend well and his strength is gone. She sets a foot by his to give him something to push against. That much done, he tries to rise, holding on to her shoulder, gets as far as his knees, but cannot seem to manage the rest. If he plants one foot on the ground, the other gives way. She solves this problem too. She picks him up with her teeth by the seat of his pants and lifts him up onto her back, which he clumsily falls upon, spread out on his belly and legs adangle. So much for taking on the world. She whinnies softly. He hugs her neck, and together they gallop away from there.

  He is not much of a dreamer. When he’s awake he’s awake, and when he sleeps he sleeps. But this night on the desert, collapsed over the back of the galloping black mare, he dreams he is traveling in a stagecoach with a beautiful woman in black who is twice his size. They are passing through dangerous country full of Indians and bandits, and she is telling him a story about a brave, resourceful, and adventurous youth on a perilous journey into a demonic wasteland. He was honest and strong, possessed of a preponderance of muscular development and animal spirits, she tells him, with square iron-cast shoulders and limbs like bars of steel. He tries to picture this, while she turns, showing him the black beauty spot in her cheek, to peer wistfully out the stagecoach window as though the beautiful youth might be out there somewhere. The stagecoach is being attacked, but somehow they are only spectators. He had golden curly hair and a manly brow, she goes on softly, turning back to him, and he had sparkling blue eyes, which were tender and soulful in repose, but firm and determined under excitement. His aquiline nose was as straight as an arrow and as if chiseled from the finest Parian marble, and he had a square jaw and cleft chin and a perfect set of even white teeth, which gleamed when he smiled like rows of lustrous pearls. She smiles faintly as though to demonstrate this pearly luster, though in fact her mouth is full of shadows. He did not take advantage of his superior strength, nor use it without considerable provocation, and then only in a fair competition. And he was always chivalrous toward women. They are completely surrounded now by Indians or bandits or both and the ride in the rocking stagecoach is getting rougher, the wooden wheels slamming against the ruts and stones and bouncing high and coming down again with a rattling jar, the leather springs squealing, bullets and arrows pimpling the paneling. He believed that he was independent and free and in control of his own destiny, she adds, sorrow clouding her face, but of course he was merely an agent of fate. And on top of that, she sighs, he is dead. Dead? he asks. He wants to crawl up on her lap and be hugged, but her hands are folded there. The coach driver up top, she says. Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s dead. The horses are out of control.

  That’s why they are going so fast and heaving about so wildly. He knows he must prove his own courage and resourcefulness; it may even be why they have undertaken this harrowing journey. He crawls down off the seat and opens the coach door. It tears away with their violent speed, sweeping several attackers off their horses as a thrown wooden block might knock down toy cavalrymen. It is not easy to reach the driver’s seat; he must work his way up the side of the speeding stagecoach, hand over hand, grasping the window frames and moldings and railings and brass fittings, and many times he is nearly flung off. Clinging to the lurching coach is like riding a wild horse, and he realizes that he may be the only person in the world who can do this. All the while, gunshots and arrows slam into the side of the coach, narrowly missing him or perhaps even hitting him, he can’t be sure, nor does he much care; he doesn’t expect to get out of this alive, he just wants to get the next thing done.

  The driver’s seat atop the express box is vacant and then it is not: a man looms high above him with burning eyes and rough grizzled chops. He is shouting at the thundering team of horses—hi! hi!— and lashing them with a long black whip, driving them ever faster. The driver seems to know that he is there, crawling up the side of the coach, but he pretends not to see him. This cannot be the real driver. The bandits or Indians must have
killed the real one. Whom he loved, or may have loved (if he knew him). Hi! cries the wild-eyed driver and cracks his whip. Though he has reached only the height of the driver’s knees, he somehow wrests the whip away from him. The driver shrinks away from him in terror as he raises the whip over his head—he seems to be standing a yard or two in front of him, as if on a platform over the first pair of horses—and then he snaps the whip and with a single stroke whisks the driver’s head clean off: it flies away, bouncing off the top of the stagecoach, with a look of blind amazement. He turns to grab up the reins but there are no reins, and the runaway horses are at full gallop, hauling the careening stagecoach toward a yawning precipice. Beside him on the seat, the driver’s headless body rocks stiffly from side to side, hammering his shoulder as if trying to knock him off the box and get back at him for taking his head off. He would jump from the doomed coach, but the lady in black is still down inside, so he has to stop it somehow before they reach the precipice. The only way he knows to do that is to crawl forward to the lead horses and rein them in. Without hesitation, he throws himself down on the first pair of horses below him, but he misses and falls between them into the tackle that conjoins them, which for some reason he associates with garter belts. He wants to rise and make his way to the front, but he is somewhat entangled, and the rhythm of the team’s galloping hoofs is lulling him to sleep. As he’s drifting off, the woman in black joins him down there in the tackle. It’s all right, she says, stroking his forehead (with her nose?). It’s not your fault. And she stretches out beside him, cradled there amid the thundering hoofs, and, at peace with himself at last (the precipice? it’s nothing, forget it), he drops off, snuggled safely up against her.

  When he awakens, he is not sure at first from what he is waking or whose might be the warm body against which he’s pressed. He keeps his eyes closed for a moment to retain something of the comforting aura of the dream before the hard world overtakes him again, the sense it gave him of knowing who he is and why he’s here, but in fact that aura has faded away and all that’s left is the memory of being at the edge of something (some woman?) and the look on the grizzled old furtrapper’s face when he told him he was the only person in the world who could do this. He’s not even sure he was himself in the dream, it was like he was somebody else, someone who was taking him somewhere he didn’t want to go. Which makes no sense. Hanging on to dreams is like trying to eat a smell. Everything is so vivid and real and full of significance at the time, but afterwards only these dim ghostly images remain to haunt the woken head.

  Well well. Mornin, sunshine. He opens his eyes a slit. It’s the saloon chanteuse standing in the doorway. Some doorway or other. Yu two sleep well?

  He’s lying on a rancid old mattress with straw ticking and rags for blankets, but it’s more easeful than the desert floor or a jolting saddle, to which he is more accustomed, and he has slept hard. And long: must be the middle of the day. His companion in the bed is the black mare, lying on her side with her back to him. He rolls away from her and sits up, still trying to recall the dream, but it’s mostly gone. Can’t remember how he got here, either. Here being a dilapidated wooden shack, badly shot up and with half the roof gone. His boots and buckskins have been removed; he’s wearing only a black union suit and a neckerchief.

  I wuz havin a dream about my father, he says with a precipitous yawn, as the mare rolls heavily out of the bed behind him and clops outside to do her morning business.

  Do tell. Nice feller?

  Dunno. Never knowed him.

  The chanteuse, standing in the noonday sunlight coming through the roof, is rigged out today in a fancy black outfit of her own: shirt and short knee-length skirt with beads and fringes, high boots, six-shooters on her hips, and a flat black hat with little crimson tassels hanging from the stiff brim, matching the ruby in her cheek. I mean in the dream, she says.

  Caint recollect. I think he tried t’kill me.

  Musta been him, awright. But git yer boots on, cowboy. Dont want the lawr t’ketch yu here.

  Caint think how I got em off. Whar we goin?

  She puts a black mask on over her eyes and hands him one like it. Yu’re a famous badman now, darlin. So we gotta round us up a gang a sneakthiefs, gunslingers, and short-iron specialists and go do some killin and robbin.

  While waiting to waylay a train that night, he and his band of outlaws, all hard men wearing black hats, sit around a campfire on top of the railway tracks they’ve scouted out, while the orange-haired chanteuse, now a bandit queen and perched high on the day’s pile of loot, sings them sentimental old ballads about lost solitude and soiled doves and tipi-burning in the untrodden vales of purple sage, and about dirty dealing and dysentery and wick-dipping in the old corral with its rivers of blood flowing beneath the whispering cottonwood trees. They’ve been out robbing stores and banks and killing people all day and they’re all a bit trail-weary, grateful for this restful interlude, and when Belle sings about the hanging judge who hanged a whole town, they all sing along (even he joins in, though he can’t sing a lick) as she lists the victims, each verse adding two or three more—He hung the teacher and the preacher and the Chinese prostitute! He hung the rambler and the gambler and the pegleg in his boot!—then in unison shout out the chorus: But he never hung me! And they laugh and spit at the fire and pass the whiskey bottles, reckless violent men of good spirit.

  His black mare is curled up beside him by the fire, allowing herself to be used as a backrest and a shield against the elements. The place they have come to is bald and open to the four winds, which are all active on the night, blowing dust up their noses and whipping their hats off. They have to keep an eye on the campfire that blown embers don’t set the dry scrub ablaze and spoil their robbery plans, but they need the light from it so as not to lose sight of the train rails, which have been eluding them all day, slippery as watersnakes. It has taken hours hunting them down to this lonely spot, and then thanks mainly to his black mare who led them here, following a spoor of fine cinder, after the rails they’d been tracking had seemingly dead-ended in a waterhole. Even here, the rails have tried to slither away, which is why they’ve built their campfire on top of them: if they shift again, they’ll all shift together.

  Most commonly after so long in the saddle, getting his thighs buffed and his prostate spanked all day, he’s pretty sore, finding sitting down and standing up equally insufferable, but the mare is an easy ride and if anything he feels better tonight than when the day began, no new torments and his old wounds and bruises mainly healed as though gently massaged and oiled away. She’s fast, too, and fearless, coolly outrunning the bullets shot at them today as they galloped away from trouble, and she can fly over fences and chasms, take any incline or crisis in her stride, turn on a nickel and leave four cents’ change. They had to kill a few breachy clerks, shopkeepers, and deputy sheriffs during the day’s adventures, but the only serious trouble they had was when they were robbing black hats from a dry goods emporium and ran into another gang robbing the same store. During the explosive shootout that erupted, the mare slipped in and stole all the hats, rescued him from where he was pinned down behind the calico bolts, and, stomping a few heads along the way, led the whole gang in a clean getaway. Almost clean. They lost a couple of men to the hail of fire, but members of the rival bunch later offered to join up with them if they could have a hat, so they are back to a full complement again.

  Now one of the new members of the gang, a rangy white-shirted and black-vested dude with muttonchops, sleeve garters, and spectacles like two dimes on a wire, interrupts the bandit queen’s legs-up number about skylarking range tramps on a bunk-house toot to complain that his hat doesn’t fit him properly. It sets down on my ears sorta funnylike, he grumbles.