Free Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed Page B

foot.
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    You don’t believe in that malarkey do you boys? the Marshal asked.
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    No I’m a Fanny Wrightite, Skinny said.
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    And I’m a Baptist, the bartender offered, that pagan nonsense cuts nothing with me.
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    Just then Royal Flush Gooseman, Furtrapper and sometimes bald-headed Cowthief, and Mighty Dike entered the room:
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    O.K. all you brush poppers, ranahans, limb skinners, and saddle warmers, this is Royal Flush Gooseman all the way from St. Louis!!!!!!!!
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    All the cowpokes rose from their tables with gosh, golly stares on their faces. The Marshal and bartender and the foreman were a little more nonchalant, each having been as far as the Mississippi River a few times apiece.
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    What you need, cowpokes? Rectifyers to heal them bruises, blankets, boots, firearms, bottle of rum all the way from Boston? Come outside and inspect my mule train. You got the money I got the time.
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    Little hand of poker while you’re at it. I even got posters of that greenhorn President of the East case you want to mount them on your bunk walls and spit tobaccy at em.
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    All the buckaroos laughed and followed Royal Flush outside to examine his mule train of goods. Some of them were already reaching into their jeans for silver with which to make purchases.
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    The Marshal, foreman and bartender continued their conversation.
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    Man, pass me another whiskey. This place is really getting eerie, never seed no town like this; all the planks holding up the buildings seem to lean, like tilt over, and there’s a disproportionate amount of shadows in reference to the sun we get—it’s like a pen and ink drawing by Edward Munch or one of them Expressionist fellows.
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    Huh?
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    See, got me talking out of my noodle. What’s your theory Marshal? Skinny McCullough asked.
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    Well you know me, boys, why if I hadda been at that party the other night instead of at the Law Enforcement Convention up the creek there, it would have been me and the Kid. Hell, me and the Earp brothers use to ambush people and shoot em in the back like they wuz dogs. He’d better not show his snake in Yellow Back Radio.
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    Big Lizzy the owner of the Rabid Black Cougar entered. A giant square-jawed woman with a tomboy haircut, her flabby breasts hung around her roped in waist. She wore an apron over a drab calico dress, with leggings and boots, and her hands were covered with hair. Below the nose bridge could be seen the faint print of a mustache.
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    She spoke in a low husky voice that sounded like sand paper rubbing together. She carried a moose over her shoulder and under her arm a Winchester Rifle.
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    Evening Big Lizzy, what’s that you got with you? Well I’ll be, the Marshal said scratching his head, it’s a moose!
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    Yeah, Lizzy answered, bagged him up in the hills while I wuz hunting. She swung the moose over her shoulder and onto the floor. Chinaboy go get me some beer mugs out of the latrine so’s I can give the boys a drink and clean up that ear that wuz shot off a couple of weeks back, it’s beginning to smell. I need a drink of Red-Eye after what I saw up there in the hills.
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    Whaddya see Big Lizzy? Skinny asked.
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    There was this woman cooking some smelly stuff in a cauldron. I came upon her about the third evening out. She was stirring with some long pole, when all of a sudden this black cowboy come riding out of the shadow and hitched up her skirts and whipped his pecker on her right on the spot. I had to put my hand on the dying moose’s mouth so he wouldn’t make no noise, cause then things really started to freak out.
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    What happened then Big Lizzy? one of the steerbusters gambling at the table asked as the others put down their cards and gathered around the bar to listen closely to Big Lizzy’s strange narrative.
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    Well they were on the ground making out and she started to writhe and hiss like a serpent and say