Free Ghost Town: A Novel by Robert Coover Page B

with nowhere to go, the ground quavering under the thunderous buffeting of their hoofs and their colliding bodies like a bedroll being shaken out. Some of the wild-eyed creatures come running straight at him, but he holds his ground, unsteady as it is, bringing them down one by one, pumping lead into their dim cow brains, his weapons growing hot in his hands. The roar of their stampeding is deafening and more than once he is brought to his knees by the violent convulsions of the earth beneath him, but then suddenly the entire herd vanishes into the night like a slate being erased and all is still.
    He holsters his pistols, picks up his fallen rifle, reloads it, and begins the long trek on foot to the campfire, stepping over and around the silhouetted carcasses that line his path back like lumpy milestones. Some of the cattle he passes are not yet dead and they gaze up at him pitiably with their big wet eyes, through which he shoots them with his rifle to make their dying short but vivid to them.
    He is met at the campfire by muttering and grumbling, incomprehensible except for the swearwords, which are in the majority but add up to nothing in particular. Tell me that agin, he says.
    We said yu done some serious damage to our herd, sheriff, snarls the wamper-jawed lout with the pencil-lined upper lip. In fact it aint thar no more. We’re gonna hafta dock yer pay.
    Thet’s good news. Didnt know I wuz gittin paid.
    Well it aint much. We figger after tonight’s deevastation yu’re about forty years in debt to us.
    And thet dont include our sentymental feelins toward them pore little dogies, says the preacherly graybeard, snatching a lizard off a rock and tossing it into the fire to watch it wriggle. We been left downright bereft.
    He eyes them coldly, rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Well thet’s most lamentable, he says. But whut wuz yu doin with alla them cattle anyhow? I thought yu wuz ahuntin injun scalps.
    Well the problem with thet, sheriff, says the hunchback, shoving a chaw of tobacco into his grizzled cheeks, is we’re plumb outa savages. Aint seed a live one with his skin still on in a coon’s age. He spits into the fire to set it sizzling.
    But whut about alla them misabused wimmenfolk?
    All them whut?
    Oh right, snorts the mestizo, glancing up with his good eye from his whittling. Hah! The wimmenfolk!
    They heehaw and whistle at that and, while the ocarina player blows a dancehall tune, a pig-eyed fat man with a waxed handlebar mustache rises from his squat for a moment to drop his pants and wriggle his arse at the fire.
    Well lets see, says the squint-eyed old fellow with the high manner. I estimate we did mebbe go dig up a ole burial ground fer some deceased scalps. Jest not t’disappoint, y’know. They’re in a saddlebag over thar. They got a unseemly odor about em, but hep yerself.
    But thet aint the point. Yu all been deppitized.
    Well we undeppitized ourselves, sheriff. It jest warnt no fun. We tuck up cowpunchin instead.
    Beats scalp huntin all t’blazes.
    Yu eat better too, says the fat man, rebuttoning his breeches. Less yu got some trigger-happy damfool comin along’n drivin off yer larder. The others rumble and growl at that, while the fat man relights a stubby black cigar butt in the fire.
    Whut I caint quite figger is whar’d yu git em all?
    Git em?
    Yer stock.
    Well we, uh, we borried em, explains a weedy wall-eyed runt, picking his teeth with a sliver of bone.
    Yu mean yu rustled alla them cattle?
    Well yu dont hafta put a name to it, sheriff. But how else yu gonna git yu a steer out in these parts?
    We jest kinder pass em around out here, y’see, says the hunchback, peering up at him over his wire-rimmed spectacles, his cheek bulging with chaw. He lets fly another load into the fire. It’s how we do it.
    I dunno. I aint never read the lawr but I think yu broke it, he says.
    They all just smile back blankly at him. Naw. Haw!
    Whut’s agin the lawr, sheriff, says the fat man around