The Ballad of Dingus Magee (13 page)

Dingus kissed her. The question had been rhetorical anyway, a hand was already groping unmistakably. Hastily
shedding his clothing, disguising his voice in a dull whisper, Dingus said, “Wait. Jest one second now, and I’ll—”

So when she had at last commenced to snore peacefully again, while Dingus still struggled to collect himself, something else moved elsewhere in the wigwam. First Dingus heard a rustling of garments that were decidely not his own. Then the woman said,
“What?
Oh, now look, you raunchy old ramrod, how many times in one night do you think I—?”

Dingus had never reached the ridgepole. In fact he had lost his bearings completely, and now, fumbling anxiously in search of his pants, he stumbled into something standing behind him. He sprang away as it went over with a sound of crockery smashing. After that he was on his feet and sprinting.

But the brave was up also by then, and Dingus was unable to dodge the hand which snatched at him from behind; it took hold even as he plunged through the entrance. The moon emerged at that same instant. So they confronted one another for the moment as if frozen by the very flood of light itself, Dingus in his woolens with their rear flap commencing to tear where the brave gripped it, half turned away, and the brave himself even more starkly unclothed and with the nature of his interrupted indulgence even more stark than that. At first there was only puzzlement on the Indian’s face. Then, still grasping the hatch of Dingus’ drawers, but with the look turning to one of immemorial indignation now, like some great castrated beast the brave began to bellow. “A paleface! Not even one of those horny Mexican missionaries, but a paleface! In my own—”

But the flap finally gave. Already moving, as if his feet for that matter had not once ceased to move, Dingus plunged back within the tent and then scampered out again at its farther side, uprooting stakes and tearing wildly at skins as he wormed frantically through. The woman screamed, and the camp came alive as if under assault. Only the moon saved him, disappearing miraculously as quickly as it had
appeared, while Dingus dove headlong behind stacked corn.

But no one was chasing him after all. Instead, the brave continued shouting where he stood, yet almost inarticulately for the moment so that the others seemed to be gathering about him more in curiosity than anything else, braves and women likewise, in their own assorted conditions of undress or interruption. And Dingus was still too much concerned with his own predicament to be startled at the fluency of the man’s English either, once he became coherent again, especially since the brave was brandishing a gleaming Winchester rifle over his head now too. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s it! The end, the absolute, fornicating end! Because they drove us from the hunting grounds of our ancestors, and we suffered that in silence! Because they gave us treaties from the Great White Father, and then they took our new lands as well, and we endured that likewise! Even when we’ve had nothing to eat but buffalo flop, we have accepted. But now an end! An end, I say! Because when they will not even let a man have his bim-bam in peace, I tell you it is time for
revenge.*”

He did not go back to Santa Fe immediately. As a matter of fact he stayed away for most of a week, knowing he would do so even as the Comanches mounted up and thundered from the reservation that same night, and so by the time he did return all of the dead had been safely buried, although certain of the larger buildings continued to smoulder. Cousin Redburn Horn himself had taken an arrow in the thigh, and although it was healing without complication the man was more anxious than ever now to return to the East. A cavalry patrol had long since been dispatched to hunt down the unpredictable renegades.

“And where were you?” Drucilla asked him. “Here when you finally might have had a chance to be a hero, you were off moping in the hills someplace.”

“Well, it ain’t my fault if’n I ain’t lucky,” Dingus said. “Anyways, looks to me like being a hero ain’t no more than being in the wrong place at the right time, is all.”

“Not that it matters to me one way or the other, actually,” the girl said then, “since personally I couldn’t care less about these banal Indian disturbances. It’s really quite prosaic, you know.”

“Huh?” Dingus said. “But what about all that there romance, and—”

“Oh, there’s only one sort of truly romantic individual left in the contemporary West, obviously. I’m collecting different cuttings now.”

She showed him a few. So this time it was even worse. “Jesse James?” he groaned. “Billy the Kid? But all they do, they rob things; is that what you mean? And for crying out loud, I heard a feller talking about Jesse one time, knowed him personal, and he told it for a true fact that he’s got granulated eyelids. Now what in thunderation is romantic about a feller blinks all the time?”

“If you don’t know, there’s simply no help for you,” Drucilla said with disdain, clipping a biography of the late James Buder Hickok from an old issue of
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Which left Dingus no less frustrated than before (the peephole had been filled in during his absence, also). Agonized, he scowled over her new collection until he knew many of the reports by heart. Finally he rode out again.

It took him months to muster the necessary courage. What he had in mind was a stagecoach waystation he had passed once, with a strong box too heavily padlocked not to hold something worth removing. He had to ride for some days, and his initial miscalculation should have been a sign. Because he planned to hole up in a mountain pass a short distance from the station and wait for dark, but when he reached the spot on a cloudless, sweltering midsummer day, it was well before noon. He was forced to perch on a flat rock for the necessary nine hours. When he unbent himself back into the saddle his horse took two sideward steps and fell dead.

“Not that it comes to much difference anyways,” Dingus decided philosophically. “Because how is
Harper’s New
Magazine
or anybody else gonter know what a notorious desperado you are less’n some writer feller happens to walk in and catch you at it?”

The dilemma appeared insoluble. Nor had it altered on the afternoon months later when, quite by chance on a trail near Alamogordo, Dingus happened upon a stagecoach that had been attacked by unquestionably professional outlaws, and recently enough so that one injured horse still thrashed in the harness. Broken baggage was strewn about the roadway. The driving team and their four passengers lay face down in a gully, where they had been lined up and murdered. Dingus was horrified at the spectacle.

So he had just put the injured horse out of its misery, and was preparing to bury the victims, when something else caught his eye. Kicking at an embankment in its efforts to rise, the trapped animal had etched a deep, circular marking with its hoof, very like the letter
D.
Dingus wet his lips, gazing at it.

There was no sound on the trail. Save for the vultures which hovered ominously above, there was no movement either. A small, sharply pointed twig actually lay at his feet, as if in conspiracy. Dingus was holding his breath. Then, snatching up the twig at last, and with furtive, darting glances about himself, hurriedly but clearly he left his portentous message in the dust:
Dingus Billy Magee done this. Beware.

Two weeks after that, in a town called Pendejo where he himself was a total stranger, he overheard gossip about another crime altogether, as yet unsolved. But by then he had been waiting with gleeful impatience to stumble upon just such a situation. The Pendejo sheriff had been shot in the back. “When’d it happen?” Dingus asked casually. “Jest last night sometime,” a waiter told him. Dingus himself had reached the town not an hour before. He nodded sagely. “Might have figured,” he said, “since I passed Dingus Billy Magee on the trail out of here this morning.”

“Dingus whoozy what?”

“Well now, you fellers jest must be behind the times up here, I reckon,” he informed them blandly. “Why, ifn
there’s a more disreputable, underhanded, back-shoorin’, poorhouse-robbin’ skunk in the whole New Mex territory, it’d be news to most folks. Yep. What I hear, this Dingus Billy Magee, he cuts the gizzard out’n law officers on sight sometimes jest from plain cantankerousness. That’s Dingus,
D-I-N-G-U-S—
”

So it took scarcely any time at all after that, and when he started back to Santa Fe again, perhaps three months later, there was already well over two thousand dollars in rewards on his head, and his name was being spelled reasonably also. “Which even Juicy Drucy is gonter have to admit ain’t bad a-tall, for a shaver not even yet nineteen,” he speculated satisfactorily. He had taken to offering physical descriptions of himself on recent occasions also, inventing the red-and-yellow fringed Mexican vest by way of embellishment, and that too had been mentioned in several accounts of his exploits. Shortly before he reached home it occurred to him that he might actually purchase one.

So Drucilla had never heard of it, of the famous garment or of any of the rest, apparently. “Because I never read the newspapers any longer,” she said contemptuously. “Why, no respectable girl would have any interest in violence and bloodshed, which is all they ever print these days, of course.”

Dingus gaped at her. “But all them cuttings you—”

“When one ceases to be a child, one puts aside childish things. I should like to marry a pillar of the community now, a banker perhaps. Yes, indeed, nothing but a banker will do.”

“A
what?
Well, I’ll be mule-sniffing son of a—”

“Cousin William, please. Your language!”

So he endured that for a week or two and then he asked her how much it would cost to buy a bank, or open one. “Oh, I imagine it might be managed for sixty or eighty thousand dollars,” she informed him, “since I would only be interested in a respectable sort of bank, naturally.”

“Sixty or eighty
thousands
Dingus screamed. “Lissen, I got four
hundred,
in a sock I buried one time, and that’s the—”

And then suddenly it came to him. She was in the kitchen, sweeping, and he literally dragged her into the yard. “All right,” he said. “Yes. But wait now. Jest wait, a month or so maybe, because it ain’t gonter be that easy. But there’s got to be the sixty, maybe even more. Because it’s been ten years, at least, that she’s been salting it away, and—”

“Who?” Drucilla said. “What are you—?”

It was Belle Nops. Dingus did not know her except casually, since he had stopped at the bordello only rarely in his wanderings as a trailhand. But he had heard the speculation among her more regular clients often enough, and now his mind began to glow with the possibilities. “Because at a dollar a hump for all them years it’s got to be a unadulterated fortune,” he said. “And on top of that there’s the profits from the drinking and the gambling likewise. And it’s all jest sitting there, in that safe which fellers says is in her office, and which—”

“But I still don’t know what you’re—”

“You jest start cogitating on exactly where you want that bank to be,” Dingus said, “and I’ll be back here in less’n a month.” He did not explain further, already leading his horse from the barn. “Oh, yes, indeedy,” he told himself, saddling up. “And it’s been getting on time I went and done me some
honest
stealing, anyways.”

But it wasn’t a month. Nor was it two or even three. He tried flattery first, but this did not even get him into the bedroom, the office. “Because you lissen here now, Sonny,” Belle Nops told him, “I nominate my own jockeys, and I ain’t so saddle-wore that they’re about to be snotty twerps wet behind the ears yet, neither. Anyways you’d rattle around like a small dipper in a big bucket.”

“But I knowed me a right smart of older ladies,” Dingus protested, “and they’d speak admiringly of me, too. Why, you jest write a brief letter of inquiry to Miss Felicia Grimshaw, over to Galveston, say, or Miss Youngblood in the same—”

“I just this morning hired on a unplucked little thirteen-year-old from Nogales,” Belle told him, “down the hall in the end room. Three dollars cash money, you can do the first-night honors.”

So then he stole a key and tried rape. What he had in mind, of course, was an eventual intimacy that would lead to his presence on an occasion when the safe was opened. But he had never been exceptionally strong, nor did he weigh as much as a hundred and forty pounds, and she outwresded him easily each time. He had been jumping her from behind the door. When he changed his tactics and did not materialize from within her closet until she stood stripped to her garters, she finally got mad enough to heave him bodily down the rear staircase.

Dingus sprained a wrist. But if he had to give up on it for a time after that, he finally did commit one actual crime while nursing the injury in a sling. He was not sure how much educational value the experience offered, the victim being an acquaintance. Too, he had intended appropriating the man’s derby hat only; the slightly moist eight hundred dollars from within it was sheer happenstance.

When a new strategy at last did occur to him, it was based on the theory that recumbency would be half the battle. So this time he waited outside the bordello entirely until he believed she would be asleep. Then he made use of his key, undressed soundlessly, and slipped into her elusive embrace.