Free Ghost Town: A Novel by Robert Coover Page A

pale humped hides forever, or anyway until his raft’s old shanks give way. Gaps open between their flanks, he pushes into them, bumped and jostled from the rear, then pokes and prods with his rifle barrel to pry open new gaps, but his progress is both slow and without sensible direction, that flickering firelight itself now lost to view.
    Hlo, sheriff. About fuckin time yu turned up, growls a hollow voice at his back. He bends round in his slope seat, his Winchester across his thighs. The posse’s just behind him, sitting around a roaring campfire by the chuckwagon, smoking, chewing their grub, belching, drinking from mugs and bottles. A gaunt bald-pated scar-faced man, wearing his hat on his back with a cord around his throat, is blowing on an ocarina, making a low wailing noise not unlike the far-off lowing of cattle, which may be all he’s heard all night, except for the sluggish thump and rustle of the chafing bodies. A one-eared mestizo with a crushed bowler and an eyepatch looks up from the old white stick he’s whittling and, the light from the fire lighting up his good eye like a hot coin, asks: Whut kep yu so goddam long?
    The sheriff’s been out, yu know, trail -blazin, says another, and they all bark and hoot at that and explode a fart or two.
    A wizened bespectacled hunchback in banker’s pants and watch-fobbed waistcoat spits into the flames and says: Well dont be a stranger, sheriff. C’mon over’n rest yer can a spell.
    He shrugs and, using his knees and raps of his rifle butt, he slowly pivots his old spindleshanks around toward the fire, but it’s an obstinate creature and by the time he has managed it, cattle have crowded up around him again and the campfire seems to have receded. Between him and it: the scrawny rumps of a dozen or so cows with their tails up in the air.
    Haw. Looks like yu’ll hafta fuck yer way in here, sheriff, says a brawny skew-jawed lout with a bandanna headband and a thin black mustache.
    Naw, them ole bossies dont fancy the sheriff, grunts the hunchback. It’s thet handsome white stallion whut’s got their tails up.
    Thet hoss is a real byooty awright. I feel a kinder lustful hankerin fer it myself.
    Boys, I tell yu, says a squint-eyed old graybeard with a preacherly manner, t’bestride sech a hoss as thet’d be like bein born agin!
    They all yea-say that campmeeting style and suck worshipfully from their whiskey bottles—Or t’ be bestrid! Yeah! Haw! Aymen, brother!—but meanwhile the cows have nudged him further and further away until he can no longer make out the details up there: just a bunch of dark shadowy figures huddled in their hats around a cold fire, alone in the dark sea of cattle, the chuckwagon a vague glimmerous shape against the black sky like a screen hiding something.
    Ho, sheriff! one of them shouts, can’t tell which, his far-off holler all but lost in the shapeless prairie night. Whar yu goin? The beans is agittin cold!
    Instead of cows’ bumholes he’s mostly looking at the front ends of steers now, their horned heads down and dangerous. In fact, he realizes that the only reason his poor old mount is still upright is that the steer that has impaled it has its horns stuck in its gut and so is holding up a creature now mainly dead. The campfire off in the distance looks no more substantial than a match being held to a cigarillo. Before it’s snuffed out altogether, he cocks his rifle, shoots the steer below behind the ear, and hops off as both beasts collapse like deflating balloons. Other steers are pawing the ground menacingly but he brings them down with his rifle, then draws his six-shooters and fires away at the lot, clearing space. The sharp shocking report of gunfire in the still night causes those near him to break in panic and they charge off blindly in all directions, pounding into each other and into the massed-up crowd of those around them, spreading terror like a stone slapped into water. Soon the entire herd is on the move but