The Ballad of Dingus Magee

1

“Pull off my boots.

I promised my mother

I’d never die with my boots on!”

Billy Clanton, The O.K. Corral, Tombstone, 1881

———

Turkey Doolan’s crotch itched. His scalp was gamy. Poised in the saddle, with one freckled hand inside his jeans and several stumpy fingers of the other beneath his sombrero, he relieved himself by scratching simultaneously and with vehemence.

But Turkey’s complaint was also mental. He knew this for a true fact as he shifted his buttocks athwart the hot leather, waiting while his companion emerged from a sheltered turning on the trail behind him. “Because I done rode with him for almost two weeks now,” he reasoned, “and still there ain’t nothing happened. Even accompanied with Mister Dingus Billy Magee hisself, and it ain’t happened yet.”

Up ahead, where the trail shelved gradually onto a low broad mesa, Turkey had noticed a cavalry patrol approaching in the distance. “But it ain’t about to happen in the middle of no sweaty desert neither,” he knew.

What he was waiting for made something of a story. He was the only child of an itinerant tinker who died when he, Turkey, was nine, and it might have had its beginnings even before that. Because he seemed ready even then, looking ahead solemnly to the occurrence of some fabulous and
unpredicated event of which only he, privately, had any intimation. He waited three years in the fourth grade alone.

They risked him behind a counter then (he had a stepfather now, a feed merchant), but there was small point in it. The boy couldn’t calculate, or wouldn’t, and weights and measures eluded him like ritual gossip mouthed in Pawnee. “At least if you’d make an error once in
my
favor,” the stepfather said. The first time they found no alternative to trusting him alone for an afternoon, this on a day in July of 1876, Turkey loaded several hundred-pound sacks of meal onto a stranger’s wagon and accepted payment in Confederate currency.

They tried in the local smithy next. He was indoctrinated by a recalcitrant mule the first morning, profoundly enough to be unable to sit for a week. Yet after that he seemed to get on, and it even looked that he had a way with horses. “I’m right glad to hear of it,” the stepfather told the blacksmith, “even if he had to be next month to thirteen before I found out.”

“Found out what?” the blacksmith asked. “That the one lesson he’ll take to is the kind gets drove home with the hind legs of a jackass,” the stepfather said.

He held the job for more than two years, although he was still waiting. It was part of him wholly now; he confronted mule and man alike with the same vapidly anticipatory dim gaze. “One day,” he would tell himself. “Sure as shootin’, one day it’s gonter happen.”

Yet he could have remained at the smith’s forever if it had not been for the girl, the farmer’s daughter. They were in the loft when the farmer chanced in, and even then it might have been all right, had the girl not inadvertendy dropped her frock over die side a moment before. The farmer gazed at the garment for perhaps four seconds where it had draped itself across a buckboard wheel, which was long enough for Turkey to deposit a saddle on his head. The man was on his feet again immediately. “But doubtless it weren’t gonter occur around that dull old town anyways,” Turkey had already convinced himself.

It was scarcely about to happen on the trail either. Home
had been Missouri, and Turkey’s last silver was gone before he crossed the Panhandle. He signed on herding sheep.

That was his first mistake. Not asking why there appeared to be no other hired hands on the ranch was the second. He had been in the pasture less than two hours when a torrent of longhorn steers came bellowing out from beneath a canopy of dust to wreak predictable enough havoc upon sheep and pasture both, if not to say almost upon Turkey himself. But if he galloped clear of the steers he did not escape the horsemen driving them. “This here’s cattle territory, Cousin,” they let him know. A fractured jaw and a sprung rib reiterated the declaration.

Haifa day later, on a back road to nowhere except away, three nondescript men in a flat-bottom wagon pulled up beside him. This was when he began to get the idea that if and when it ever did come to pass, whatever it was, he wasn’t going to have much luck with it. “Sheep or cattle, Brother?” one of the riders asked. Turkey had an ache in his face, another in his kidney. “Sure, boys,” he said. “Cattle, boys, all down the line.” No one had told him how protractile the war was, or how various its minions. When he hit the roadbed the sheepmen took turns walking on him.

Some hours later he ventured toward a farmhouse to ask a meal. He was shown eight inches of open slat in a Comanche shooting blind and the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun. “State your allegiance, Uncle,” a female voice demanded.

“Aw, lady,” Turkey pleaded, already backing off, “you say first, huh?”

This set the tone. Once in a while he worked at a forge again, which seemed safe enough, but the jobs would never last. They couldn’t, because he was still waiting. So when he took to theft it wasn’t out of greed, or any motive other than the prosaic demands of necessity, of survival. He never became fully adept, never professional. Chickens were his strong suit, sometimes calves young enough to be lashed across a pommel. Perhaps once a year in some isolated back-trail town he would discover a cashbox that was not being watched too closely, or by anyone too acute.

But still it failed to happen, and after four long, unregenerate years he began to sense a certain disillusionment, even something of annoyance. One day he found himself deep in the New Mexico territory without even chickory for his coffee. “All right, then,” he said. “So I reckon it’s about time I made it happen on my own.”

So when he chanced upon his next wayside cantina he paid no attention at all to the handsome, well-combed gelding tethered without. The cantina’s door was open, and when he stepped into the gloom a rusted, secondhand 1873 Colt Peacemaker was at the operative position in his fist. “All right, boys,” he growled, “let’s do the business, everybody’s hands up and I’ll take whatever you’re holding, cash money and don’t omit the watches neither!”

There were two people in the cool windowless dusk. The pigtailed Chinaman behind the bar gazed at him incredulously, without other response. The young man reclining with his boots on the lone table and with a tankard of beer in his hand did not raise the beer, nor did he lower his boots. “Durn it, now,” Turkey grunted, “dint you hear me, boys? I’m riled and I’m luckless, and that can make a man mighty mean.”

“Sure can,” the young man with the beer said.

“You’re jest asking me for trouble, boys,” Turkey said.

“Who says, now?”

Turkey finally got around to considering him. He was probably Turkey’s own age, which was nineteen. He was slight, and his boots against the tabletop evidenced their newness and their cost. He wore a fringed red-and-yellow Mexican wool vest. And he smiled and smiled, from under fair unruly hair and a memorable sombrero.

But Turkey was looking at the weapons now also. The youth bore a gleaming sheathed revolver on each hip, slung low and almost plumbing the floor where his chair was tilted backward, and a third revolver lay between his heels on the table, evidently removed there from his waistband. Behind his chair a repeating Winchester rifle slanted against the peeling adobe. Next to that a shotgun reposed.

And something was happening to Turkey now at that, at last it truly was. “You got aholt of yourself yet?” the seated youth asked.

“Aw, now,” Turkey said.

“Have a
cerveza”
the youth said.

Turkey had begun to scratch himself. “I seen your pitcher,” he pronounced, “drawed on a ‘Wanted’ poster. You’re Mister Dingus Billy Magee.”

“Have a
cerveza,
seeing as how you got holt of yourself.”

“Aw, now,” Turkey said. “Aw, now, I dint mean nothing.”

“Ain’t nobody said otherwise.”

Turkey shuffled toward the table, tickled pink. Already he could hear himself talking about it. “Boys, yes sir, one day over there to the New Mex, I had me a drink with Mister Dingus Billy Magee hisself.”

He finally got close enough, still scratching, when Mister Dingus Billy Magee, desperado whom Turkey had long since cherished as a paradigm, reached up and clobbered him back of the ear with a fourth revolver that had been concealed below the chair in his other hand.

So the sense of expectation was greater than ever now. Because that was almost two weeks ago, and a man could not ride with Dingus Billy Magee for two weeks without something extraordinary coming to pass; Turkey surmised this for a fact. Dingus had magnanimously dismissed the circumstances of their meeting, this after Turkey had awakened beneath the table the following morning, and a few days later had even made Turkey a gift of the gaudy red-and-yellow Mexican vest. Turkey had discovered several bullet holes in the garment.

“I shouldn’t oughter accept it, Dingus,” he protested. “Duds a feller’s been shot at in, it’s sort of sentimental.”

But if he rode with pride and assurance now, it was also with a certain bafflement. Because they had been moving undeviatingly across the flat, hot, seemingly endless mesa since that first morning, yet with neither aim nor object that Turkey could perceive. They were headed generally
west; he fathomed that much without difficulty, because the mountains of Old Mexico remained always at their left. But not once had Dingus offered a word about what was in his mind.

So Turkey kept on waiting. That was what he was doing now, after the two weeks, scratching his groin on an otherwise unstimulating sultry afternoon as Dingus moved up from behind him to contemplate the cavalry patrol approaching slowly along the ragged trail. There were some dozen troopers, led by a captain whose braid they could discern from a considerable remove. Dingus greeted the sight with contempt. “Bunch of Fettermans,” he snorted.

“What’s a fetterman?” Turkey wanted to know.

“You never heard of Fetterman?”

“Don’t reckon.”

Dingus grimaced. “Fetterman was this brave captain they had somewheres—up to Fort Phil Kearny—used to brag he could take eighty men and ride smack through the whole Sioux nation. So comes one time they have to rescue this wagon train, and off goes Fetterman with jest the eighty men he always bragged on.
Ptheww! Ptheww!
Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapahoes under every bush. And this brave Fettermen, not only is he mortally shot hisself, but all the rest of them soljers get mortally shot likewise. The complete eighty.”