The Ballad of Dingus Magee (17 page)

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” he cried, although oblivious of his own exclamations now, “that dopey old Doc! This’ll learn him what a feller kin believe in, I reckon!”

Then Dingus was gone (Turkey had seen him for half a second actually, perhaps less) and silence again flooded the night. There was no visible movement now, Dingus could be anywhere, Hoke Birdsill similarly. So when the next shot came, and no mere revolver’s crack this time but the unmistakable boom of a shotgun instead, flashing behind a hooded wagon toward which Turkey was not looking at all, he had no idea who had fired, no way of determining shooter or intended victim. The echo rocked and clattered across the town, a dog yelped in disapprobation—and then the stillness settled again like doom. Turkey’s heartbeat ceased one further time. “Dingus?” he whispered. “Aw, come on, git ‘im, git’im!”

Then a sickening, an impossible idea crossed Turkey Doolan’s mind, one that he could not have conceived of even a moment before. “Dingus?” he said again. Turkey dared not move.

Yet only the silence persisted, the impenetrable dark, through which an immense sadness stole over Turkey Doolan where he crouched. And then with it, from out of nowhere, from out of memory long years buried now, four lines of poetry came into his head, the only lines of poetry Turkey had ever learned, written by that beloved frontiersman Captain Jack Crawford at the death of Wild Bill himself. Doc was an old turd, Doc’s mockery could never detract from their grace, their beauty. As always, they brought tears into Turkey Doolan’s eyes:

Under the sod at Deadwood Gulch

We have laid Bill’s last remains:

No more his manly form will hail

The Red Man on the plains
…

And Dingus? If the impossible happened to Dingus, would he too find his bard, would there arise someone to compose the stanzas worthy of this so much nobler life? Turkey felt bereft, a terrible desolation visited him.

But finally now, faintly, at long last he believed he heard footsteps, people approaching distantly. He could not be sure—nor could he bear it any longer. Turkey built himself shaking to his feet.

So he was already feeling his way toward the top step when he became aware of the woman again, when he heard her venture forward through the darkness herself. “What happened?” she whispered hoarsely. “Did it—was it the way you said it would—?”

And then Turkey despised himself for his doubts, for his lapse of faith. Rising to his full height, less in restitution for the affront to Dingus alone than to everything he himself
held sacred, Turkey proclaimed, “Ma’am, you could wager your last gold dollar on it. Now a slight portion weren’t too distinct, maybe, but it were Hoke Birdsill got his’n, absolutely.”

“Sheriff Birdsill,dead?”

The woman’s voice was remote, although perhaps somewhat thoughtful also. “Yes’m,” Turkey said, peering into the street anew. “Why, I don’t doubt, if’n we lighted that there lamp we could be the first lucky folks to view his mutilated remains where they fell. Especially since it don’t appear nobody else in town is rushing out awful hasty—”

So he had glanced back once more, waiting to see if she might in fact retrieve the lamp, when a curious sensation of self-consciousness took hold of him. Because the woman seemed to be considering him oddly in the blackness now, looking him up and down intently as if she had not before been truly aware of his presence at all. “Sheriff Birdsill is dead?” she said again.

“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.