Casey Not Casey

Dog Killing

Feb 2022

~~~

Hell of a thing, being paid to kill a dog.

I shot the mutt with a .55-caliber smoothbore. Like the ones they used in the war. Unfortunately, I aimed like I was in one. The damn dog was just staring at me, patiently awaiting its demise, and I still somehow caught the bitch in the leg. Blew it clean off. It went yipping and howling in circles, licking itself, howling some more, licking some more. The shot cracked into the desert and some coyotes came out conversing to it. As for myself, I think I said, “Ah shit,” and “Goddammit,” and I think the dog had its share of profanity, too.

While I reloaded, the dog took a seat. It could have run off. Even on three wings and a feeling it could have run off. Instead, it just stared at me as if I was gonna amend what I’d just done. I think I said, “You should go,” but I don’t remember. It was some pitiful admission that I didn’t like the dog just sitting there. “This is an awful sore business,” I think I told it, and it licked its wounds, and I said, “Yeah.” Then it stared at me. Stared at me with them punitive eyes. Like when you steal candy from a baby, and they glare at you. There ain’t nothing there but a glare, and a whole lot of words nonetheless. And there that dog sat, staring, sometimes licking, but mostly staring. And I thought, damn, I’d rather shoot it in the back than pop it while it stared me down, or God forbid it tasked me with beating it to death with the stock. They said soldiers used the .55-caliber smoothbore’s stock to beat each other to death on the battlefield until they fashioned and distributed what they call ‘bayonets.’ But this gun don’t have one.

I dare say, it’s a hell of a thing, being paid to kill a dog.

Finishing my reload, I took aim and fired. This here second round put the dog down. It curled like a bug, nose to tail, and fell over. A tuft of dirt and sand lifted and scratched over some cactus and some pungent blackpowder stenched the air. I stared at the body as the shot cracked into the desert again, but this time the coyotes were quiet, as if it were the echo of a door being slammed shut and they knew better than to come knocking.

“Well,” I said. “That’s it then.”

*~*~*~*

Come morning, I ventured to the tavern and waited outside for my pay. Don’t rightly know the man who had summoned myself to the task, only that I could hardly discern if he had small hands or big pockets. I think it were the latter, which is why I took the job. Big pocket men keep their word. They got places to store them, after all. Now, he did hire me in a hurry, and I got to the task in a hurry. Part of me worried he’d be in a hurry to not show. Like when a man has something to do, so instead of taking to his responsibilities he turns to flipping a newspaper for a few hours. Legs up, smokes packed, nodding on occasion, divesting some news of some sort. It might not look it, but that there is a man in a hurry. Lord, can a man be fast in doing a whole lotta nothing. But that wasn’t all my concerns: a speedy expedition could be easily forgot outright, and my benefactor was almost certainly drunk at the time of our commerce. But I was gonna wait. I’d little else to do.

As I stood outside the pub, some semblance of an argument broke out at the mouth of an alley and a moment later a mangy mutt bounded right by, ears flopping, its gait stretched and playful. It had a boot in its mouth and as it distanced itself from its crime it stopped and turned around like a leaf in an uncertain wind. An old fella emerged from the alley, hobbling mudwise on one boot. I think that dog had the other. The fella said, “Give me back that boot! Give it back or I’mma kill ye, ye sonuvabitch!”

Both the dog’s and my ears perked at this. I looked at the fella. I about said, “I know a man who could do that job for ya,” the man being myself. I’ve been told if you put yourself in what they call the ‘third-person’ it adds some since of awe to your being, as if you’d approached from the aether, God’s grace manifesting for those in need. But I saw this fella was wearing grey longjohns with shit stains implausibly greasing his knees and he had missing teeth and most notably of all he had no pockets whatsoever. It seemed the fetching of that boot would be a matter of manual labor and I like to trust that those days were behind me. I earned pocket money now. The sort you folded.

The one-booted fella clambered up on the tavern porch and the dog dropped low and slapped its big meaty lion’s feet on the slats, its rear in the air, the tail swishing.

“Drop it,” the fella said. “You drop that goddam boot.” Despite the meanness of the words, the fella started to cry. He said, “C’mon now, don’t do this to me.” Choking up, he put his arms out and swept his tears in the nook of his elbow, in the nook of those dirty ragged clothes. The dog’s tail swished even faster. The man sniffed and ran a hand under his nose. “Ah, my life, what happened?” He fell to the porch and leaned against it and put his head into his hands. “Awww hell, awww hell.”

I’d seen enough. I looked at the dog in case I needed to remember its face and then I turned and went into the tavern. My boots filled the empty air as I strode to a table. Taking a seat, I slowly sighted the rest of the patrons and doers. The innkeeper was spit shining mugs. The piano player sat at his instrument, smoking a tobacco pipe and between puffs he’d use its stem to trace lines on his sheet music. A few men sat at a table playing cards. Feeling my stare, they looked back and asked if I play. I said no. They said I should, and I said I should not, and they grinned and called me smart. On the second floor above, one of the sportin women was passed out with her legs dangling through the railings. Her john was at the bottom of the stairs with his head jammed against the corner. Looked like an awful hard fall and he looked awfully dead on account of it.

While I mulled just how far a neck could bend without breaking, my benefactor finally showed. Overdressed and all too proper, he stood at the door looking at me like some black ant standing at the hole of the wrong colony. I waved him in. He still erred on caution, pausing to look around some more. The poker players looked at him. They said something, and he said something back. I stood up and waved and yelled at him because he might be hard of seeing and therefore hard of hearing, usually them come in pairs. Misfortune needs company, my mother used to say. She was born without feet, so I think her misfortune paired up and walked off.

Finally, my benefactor saw me and walked in. He had this nice jacket on him and there was this silver-looking watch dangling from a front pocket. Wish I got a better look, but he was quick to draw up its chain and stuff it away.

He arrived at my table. “No poker games for you?” he said.

“It’s the morning,” I said. Truthfully, I didn’t play. Ever. But I said, “Maybe later.”

The man looked around sheepishly, like he was prey and any shadow might bare teeth. But just as I surmised him to be of clayfeet he suddenly smiled and made some mention about his nerves and how this was unusual business for him.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “Alright.”

He took a seat.

He did look a little nervous. I asked him, “Are you alright?”

“Is it done?” he blurted. I don’t think he was quite alright. Before I could answer, he looked down and fumbled around with the chair and scooted it forward. He said again, “Is it done?”

“I killed the dog,” I said.

The man squirmed in his seat again. He swept a hand across the tabletop. “Did…” He paused. He brought his hand back and sucked at a splinter in a finger. He said, “Did the farmer hear or see you?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“You said you killed the dog, right?”

“Right.”

“Did you club it or knife it?”

“I shot it.”

“What? What’d you shoot it with?”

“.55-caliber smoothbore,” I said. “Like the ones they used in the war.”

“How’d he not hear that?”

I said again, “What do you mean?”

“He ain’t deaf,” the man said. “Was he not home?”

“The farmer?”

“Yeah the farmer, who else?”

“Oh, the farmer. Yeah. He was home.”

The man took a great breath. He’d been sitting for a minute, but this was the sort of breath you take when you’d just finished a long haul. While I pondered the man’s condition, he took his hat off and put it on the table and he swept his hair and then he put both hands on the hat and started thumbing it back and forth. I didn’t see any sweat on him. Not even a smudge on the forehead. No, no I’d wager he’d not hauled long or short neither. Matter of fact, he seemed the sort to ride a horse just to cross a road. Maybe he just had some of that inner tiredness, like when you don’t feel like doing nothing so you start to look like you’ve already done everything. My mother, she called it—

“Sir,” he said.

“Yessir,” I said. I took my eyes from his clean forehead to his eyes. I said again, “Yessir.”

“Does the farmer know the dog is dead or not?”

“I suspect,” I said, but I paused to give it thought. I finished: “I suspect he does in some way.”

“He either does, or he does not.”

“Yessir,” I said. “I suspect that’s true of near everything.”

The man laughed and it came out like a runt’s bark. He said, “Now, sir.”

“Yessir.”

“Sir, I paid you to kill that dog.”

“Hell of a thing,” I said. “But you haven’t paid me yet.”

Business transactions are tricky. Can’t rush it. Can’t ever rush it. Maybe I’d get more if I made some sweet small talk. I knew a guy who said if you pay for their beer, they’ll buy you two by the end of it. And sometimes they don’t even finish their beer, so you get three! Or at least two and a half.

“I didn’t just pay you to kill any dog,” the man said. “I paid you to kill his dog.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “What?”

I apologized. I said my mind was elsewhere. I asked him to repeat himself.

The man leaned back. He cleared his throat. His eyes went to the innkeeper. The innkeeper’s eyes were staring down a mug as if some smudge were talking back to him. The piano player was gawking at us both as he leaned back into his instrument, playing a key now and again with the elbows as he took drags on his tobacco pipe. On the second floor above, the lady had risen, and she was staring down at the john. She said, “Are you alive?” She sounded angry about it, like it were some insult the man had gone off and found some new way to ultimate peace and she got no cut of it. She leaned over the railing and yelled at the innkeeper and the innkeeper yelled back that he was sure the john was alive. Just then, the john started to snore. That was a good sign. I raised my voice and said, “He’s snoring!” And they said they know, and the poker players put down their cards and told everyone to shut the fuck up, and I said well alright then.

“This town,” my benefactor said as he looked back at me.

“You haven’t paid me yet,” I said again. But I paused, thinking this an error. What I should have said was, ‘Let me get you a beer. You seem tired. You want a beer?’ Too late now. I doubled down. I gave him the truth. Rather, I recollected it to the best of my abilities. I said: “I think we had an arrangement.”

“You’ll get your money,” the man said. “Matter of fact.”

He leaned back. He leaned way back, actually, an impressive lean when it comes to fetching cash, like he’d need some measure of machinery to help him out. Myself, I don’t lean at all. Hell, if I’m leaning it’s because I can’t find the damn money. Sometimes you get so poor that you lose money in your own damn pockets like gold in a cave and despite them stories gold don’t wink in the dark. But my benefactor quickly straightened up and took out his folding money. He counted it. He paid. I counted it. I counted nothing extra. I should’ve ordered that beer.

“It’s all there?” he said. I think it was a question.

“Should be,” I said which in the moment felt a little too threatening, so I quickly pocketed the money and said, “Alright,” and I started to get up. I think I also said, “Good doing business,” which is a kind way of saying ‘I hope we can do this again,’ or in this particular man’s channel something along the lines of, ‘I hope some new hound bothers you mightily so,’ but the odds of that were probably pretty low.

But the man said, “Now wait.”

Pausing, I looked down and said, “Is there another dog?” I thought I sounded a little too excited about it, so I downgraded, and awkwardly stammered, “Or even a cat. A cat’s fine.”

“What?” the man said. Then he closed his eyes and opened them real fast but somehow, somehow I knew that wasn’t some ordinary blink. He sighed. He gestured back to the table. Maybe he did have a long haul getting here. Some men just don’t sweat much.

I took a seat. “Sir,” I said. My stomach turned with excitement. I said, “Sir, can I get you a beer?”

“I want a finished story,” the man said.

Finished Story soared through my head. Finished Story. Was it some German beer? Perhaps a Nordic craft. Finnish would make sense. I hurriedly worried that I would look ridiculous if I didn’t know. I would appear an uncultured poltroon, or worse, a philistine. Then I realized he was not talking about beer at all, and I said, “Oh.”

“You shot the dog, yet the farmer didn’t hear,” the man said, his eyes darting across the table as if he were trying to solve a crime right then and there. He looked up. “How could such a series of events have transpired?”

“Well,” I said. “There was no other way for them to, I suspect.”

“You suspect?”

“I suspect so. I suspect that… that I suspect.”

“On what account?”

“I suspect the farmer didn’t hear on account of the farmer being dead,” I said.

The man laughed, a little more sincerely this time. I didn’t find it funny, but I laughed, too, just so his chuckling wouldn’t squirm in loneliness, but the second I contributed the man’s laugh died and he leaned forward. He said, “Are you serious?”

I said, “What?”

“You…” He paused. He looked at the innkeeper, the pianist, the poker players, the philanderers, though frankly they were all philanderers. He looked back at me, and he said quietly, “You shot the farmer?”

I said, “Sir?”

He leaned across the table and in a whisper secreted me the question behind the guard of his palm: “You killed the farmer?”

“Oh,” I said and laughed. “I mean it’d be awful hard to kill a dog with the owner there, don’t you think?”

The man fell back. His chair tipped. I put a hand out. If he was gonna fall, he was gonna fall, but I put that hand out anyway, and like a little hook on the end of it I said, “Sir.”

Fortunately, the chair tipped back onto its front and the momentum carried the man’s head into his hands.

“Christ Almighty,” he said. He looked up. He said, “How?”

“How with the—”

“The farmer!” He yelled and the piano clanked a few keys as its player jumped.  The pianist swept some ash off his knee and looked sternly at us both. My benefactor laughed and apologized to the room and then whispered to me, “How did you kill the farmer?”

“I knifed him,” I said.

“I thought you said you shot the dog.”

“Well yeah. The .55-caliber smoothbore was the farmer’s. I think the man’d fought in the war himself. Don’t reckon to know which side, this being the bloodlands and all. Maybe he was just one of them rogues. Or maybe he just happened to have a .55-caliber smoothbore, like they had in the war, but you know, he just had it by some other circumstance.”

“Christ Almighty,” the man said.

I don’t think this man knew much about guns or war, but everyone knew religion so I said, “Sir?”

“Christ Almighty,” the man said again, and he put his head into his hands once more and when he glanced through his thumb-and-pointin’ finger he looked at me and said, “God damn you.”

That hurt. I said, “Sir,” but this time in an excusing way.

“Sorry,” the man said. “I apologize.” He straightened up again and he patted his hands on his expensive looking jacket and I caught a glimpse of that nice silver-looking watch, like a fish winking from a tarpit, then it was gone. He looked up at the ceiling and he just blew air. He blew air a long, long while. Long enough that the poker players looked over their shoulders. I looked at them and made one of them faces that said, “No, he’s alright. Just leave him be, and by virtue of me sitting in such close proximity, also leave myself be.” The poker players’ eyebrows went up like some caterpillar collective and then they shrugged and turned around and started laughing. I now blew air myself for the trouble had passed.

“Alright,” my benefactor said. I was relieved to hear him speak. He said again, “Alright.”

His head came back down, and his hands patted his legs. He said, “Have you told anyone what you did?”

“Only you,” I said.

“Only me?”

“Yessir. I felt you were the most important one to tell.”

“Yes,” the man said. “I suppose that makes some sense.”

“Yessir. I agree, sir.”

He cleared his throat and looked at his hat. Then he looked at me. He said, “Did anyone see you?”

“Last night?”

He nodded.

I said, “No. No one else lives out that way.”

“Absolutely no one?”

I shook my head. I said, “The ground there’s actually quite hard. Can’t get much out of it. The farmer told me that he used to live east of the Missouri on a prosperous farm but that some well-dressed prospectors had come by and booted him out of there. I think he was just telling me so that I knew that he knew the soil there wasn’t much better than salted earth. I suspect in reflection his agrarian efforts are less embarrassing that way, but I’m not one to judge regardless.”

“Wait,” my benefactor said. “You talked to him?”

“No, not really. He just told me a lot about his life as I stabbed him to death.”

The man’s eyebrows went up and his head bobbed back and forth. He said, “I see. It seems…” He cleared his throat. “It seems this effort took some time.”

“It sometimes does,” I said.

My benefactor picked up his hat and returned it to his head. He said, “I think we should go see this farmer.”

“Not much to see,” I said. “On account of him being—”

“I’ll pay you,” the man said. “Twenty dollars more to come out there with me.”

“Twenty dollars,” I said. It was a lot of money to weigh with two words on one tongue. And what if he gave me a full twenty-dollar bill for it? I had a full twenty once and I’d never been so terrified in all my life. Like holding a gold bar in your hand, except its addicted to gusts of wind and thieves can practically snort it out of your pocket and all those things aside on occasion I’d stare at it and imagine myself tearing it in half, like some horrible plague of self-destruction had followed that little piece of paper into my life. I suppose that’s when I really got a full accounting of my poverty, when money itself could become such a fear factor. One dainty piece of paper, sitting in the dark of my pocket like a murderer stooped on a church’s step. You shake that gentleman’s hand, my ma would probably say. He’s the first one here, after all. Well. I eventually handed that twenty to a candy store teller and in the brief moment my money was gone, and I had nothing in its place, I thought he had simply stolen it, and I felt Biblical urges of vengeance rise up in me to get it back. But I got the $19.95 in change and some grousing by the storeowner who complained that I’d emptied his register and to not come back again if I didn’t have a kid’s denomination. That twenty just seemed to cause everyone trouble, to be frank.

“I said I’ll pay you,” my benefactor said and I looked up to see him leaning forward.

I said, “Can you pay it in ones?”

He smiled warmly. “Of course I can.”

Relief washed over me. I said, “That’s a deal then. Do you want to go now?”

“Yes. We’ll make free like sooners,” he said. I found that quite charming. Were I of feminine qualities, I may have found myself a bit shy in that moment. He added that he had but one horse, but we could ride it together. My masculinity returned with some speed, and I quickly inquired to which end of this horse I’d be sitting.

“To which end would you be comfortable?” he said.

I said, “I don’t know. I’ve never ridden a horse with another man.”

My benefactor sighed. He asked me if I had a quarter. I said I figured he’d be the one to have one. He said he carries denominations much larger than a quarter. I said that’s impressive. He asked again if I had a quarter and I said I did, and I took it out to prove it to him. He took it and held it up and turned it side to side. Before he could say anything, I inquired if he was going to return that quarter to me.

“Yes of course,” he said. Again he turned the coin side to side, showing its embroidering. “Eagle, Lady Liberty,” he said, and he thumbed the quarter into the air and caught it in a clap of hands. He looked at me over his knuckles like some augur over his white stones and said, “Call it.”

*~*~*~*

The horse galloped beneath us, the terrain a terrible roughness that had us up and down in the saddle and just as well left and right of it. I was sitting front, my benefactor behind me. I’d won the coin toss, but I think I may have lost it. As I felt his groin now and again pressing into me, I wondered if there was any winning that toss for if the seating arrangement were reversed I’m not sure my comfort would find much improvement. I considered a new position of perhaps swinging side-saddle, but I’d only seen womenfolk and one-legged cowboys do that.

He said, “Are you doing alright?”

I said, “Yes,” and lied further, “I’m quite alright.”

“Good.”

“On the way back,” I said. “We should switch places. To be fair.”

He said, “What?”

I turned my head so that he could see at least one of my eyes, for my mother said much of what we say is verbalized in squints and stares. I shouted: “We should swap places on the return trip!”

“Oh yes! That’s quite alright,” he said. “I appreciate your kindness!”

The horse slowed as it crossed a dead creek bed, the fragmented earth littered with bones of fish and more terrestrial creatures alike, and even the bones of the birds who had perhaps once picked clean their skeletal priors. I thought it an amusing sight, there being the swimming, walking, and flying sort all mulched together. I must have walked right past them when I went to the farm in the night.

“Why’d you bring that gun?” my benefactor asked.

I had the .55-caliber smoothbore keeled over my thighs and while one hand gripped the reins the other held firm to the rifled accoutrement. Before I could answer, the horse giddied, and we both leaned back and I held onto the pommel and my benefactor’s hands gripped my breast and then moved to my stomach and then back up to my breast and I think he apologized somewhere in between.

“It’s from the war!” I shouted, as the horse’s clopping filled the air and the wind stole half my words.

“You’ve never ridden a horse before?” he said.

“Like an antique of sorts!” I said. “Do you not know about the war?”

“Well,” he yelled. “I’m not one to judge!”

“The country tore itself in half!” I said.

“It’s quite alright!” my benefactor said. “There’s a first time for everything!”

“Yes!” I shouted. “I suspect that’s true!”

*~*~*~*

The farmstead came into view and we brought the horse to a slow, huffing walk.

“So,” my benefactor said. “Is this it?”

Because it was, I said it was and he said, “That’s the truth,” which I found peculiar but said nothing to it. The farmstead consisted of a single-roomed home made out of old, grey wood, a gabled attic and a slanted roof. Its porch carried a number of goodies like a set of indian dreamcatchers, a pair of old scalps one which looked indian and the other blonde so it was naturally the more curious of the two, beneath these relics were a couple of shovels, shovelheads, bundles of sticks for firewood, busted up cacti, needled and bulbed and sapped and all that, and a broom which sitting outdoors just seemed like a weapon for a lost cause. Beside the home lay his farm, a little wooden fence squared out over a patch of land about twenty feet by twenty feet, though it was mostly the fencing in of a dream and a couple of stakes and twine alone didn’t capture no crop and so those little irrigation lines sat dry as bones. Wasted efforts. He’d been sweating into oblivion, as my mother would say.

“What was he trying to grow?” my benefactor said.

“I don’t know.”

“Potatoes, you think?”

“I don’t know any other way to tell you I don’t know,” I said. I looked down and held the reins out to my side and looked down at the horse. “How do we get off this thing?”

As if to answer, my benefactor slid back off the horse’s rump like some sorta showman. He came around the front with a hitch in his step. He knew I was impressed. For all his peculiarities, his talents in horse riding were a bit surprising. He offered to help me down, but I said ladies and one-legged cowboys needed such assistance and I could do it myself. I swung a leg out and fell to the ground in a puff of desert sand and dirt. The horse pinned its ears and the man said, “Well.”

I got back up and patted myself down and said outloud to no one or no thing in particular: “Thanks.”

“Where’s the dog?” he asked.

I took a great breath and peeled my eyes around. “Last time I was here it was night,” I said, already excusing myself from a quick answer. Finally, I pointed past the farm and toward a thicket of cactus and scrub which looked vaguely familiar. “I think I shot it somewheres over there.”

“I don’t see it,” the man said.

“Coyotes probably got it,” I said.

“Oh. Right.” He looked toward the home. “You think they got the farmer too?”

“No,” I said. “Coyotes know we get a little ceremonial about our dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, no stranger dogs are here for that there dead dog, but we’re here for that there dead farmer, are we not?” I said and I drew up the .55-caliber smoothbore and rode it up over my shoulder, hitching it there like a soldier or at least I think like a soldier. “Betcha them coyotes knew we were coming.”

“I understand. By the way, it’s ‘coyote,’” the man said. “You say it like ‘coyote.’”

I said, “What?”

“The pronunciation,” he said. He rolled his hands before him: “Coyote is said like ‘coyote’, not this ‘coyote’ sound you’re making.” His hands pinched and pulled apart like he was measuring the syllables. “’Coyote.’ ‘Coyote.’”

I said if you keep repeating that word over and over then I’m about to forget what it means. Before he could respond, or God forbid say that word again, I strode across the farmer’s porch. By some grace, my benefactor quit his linguistical molestations and joined me. We walked through the front door, myself first. I immediately went to the kitchen cupboards while my benefactor held a cloth over his face and said, “God” this and, “Jesus” that, and I said, “You’d think a farmer would have eggs,” and my benefactor went on about Almighties, and I said, “On second thought I didn’t see a coup.” I closed the cupboards and turned around and said, “That’s where he went wrong. With the farming I mean. Chickens would’ve thrived here.”

“There’s so much blood,” the man said, glancing at me over his handkerchief.

I swatted a few flies off me and said, “Yes, I suspect there is. It’s mostly dried now.”

“It’s everywhere,” he said.

“It was mostly in one place before I got here,” I said and laughed. I thought it was funny, anyway.

The handkerchief came down. My benefactor’s voice seemed all-of-a-sudden tired as he said, “You murdered him.”

I didn’t quite hear that over my chuckling and so I asked him what he said.

He said, “Ah, nothing. It matters little now.” He glanced across the room, finding a shotgun leaning in the corner beside the farmer’s bed. “There’s a shotgun,” he said. He glanced at me.

I nodded. “Yup.”

“You took that old antique, but not the shotgun?”

“That scattergun is older than this here .55-caliber smoothbore,” I said. I nodded. “I don’t think they used the scattering sort in the war. At least not to my recollection, but I wasn’t there.”

My benefactor looked back at it. He slowly stepped over the bloodstains and past a pair of leathery fingers that the farmer had lost in our quarreling. My benefactor took a long breath. As he stared at the scattergun, he had this look like he was about to pick up something heavy. Not sure why. That rusted popper didn’t weigh much. He glanced at me. I stared back. He turned around, leaned over, picked it up, and turned back around.

“It really isn’t all that,” I said. “He should’ve sold it for a coup and raised himself some chickens.”

He lowered the gate and checked the barrels and closed the gate and pointed the barrels at me. “It’s ‘chicken coop’, you stupid fool,” he said and pulled the trigger. The hammers clacked and the man squinted.

I laughed. “You kinda look like the farmer did last night,” I said.

My benefactor’s face got a little down and he apologized for some reason and said, “Truly, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He held his hands out as if I were in the process of robbing him. “I’m sorry. Truly, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

I didn’t know what he meant. He was absolutely right: it was chicken coop, not coup. But I just knew I wanted to sound smart and proper, and like someone that could do business with him in the future. I said, “You probably can’t sell that for much. Barrel’s rusted, the hammers’re bent, and the wood’s full of termites.”

The man looked down and just then a big fat black spider ran out of one of the barrels. My benefactor dropped the gun and jumped as if he’d just noticed his feet in a fire. He danced back across the room, his boots crushing the farmer’s displaced appendages and kicking the dead man’s head, causing my benefactor to sprawl out, arms flailing as if he were swimming, and I caught him and kept him on his feet. Touching me, he yelped again and his hands went to thrashing and then he looked up and chortled or made some strange sound I could hardly describe without embarrassing the fella that made it. We just then seemed, to be frank, of different worlds, and what we found funny was surely just as foreign.

“Whoa there,” I said, my eyes looking elsewhere.

He stood upright. Cleared his throat of embarrassment.

I looked at the spider traversing the pipe of the scattergun. It had motes of cobwebs for shoes. I thought that peculiar. His kind didn’t seem the webmaking sort. Maybe they were the moccasins of the spider world. Or maybe it were a lady spider and I found myself staring in at some alien fashion altogether.

“I hate bugs,” my benefactor said, laughing nervously.

“Yeah they tend to get everywhere,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, they don’t hate you much. They’re just present, that’s all. It’s like we’re in different worlds. Did you know, and I heard this somewhere, but did you know that they say that while we sleep we chew up about a dozen spiders in our lifetime? I thought that a curiosity. Spiders don’t strike me as dumb so I thought maybe it was an issue of melancholy.”

“Well I hate them,” he said again, clearly ignoring me.

Since he seemed a man provincial to business and business alone, I said, “Want me to kill it?”

My benefactor stared at me. I stared back. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I thought to shout that he had another bugger on his shoulder, to get him to spin about like a ponce and ditch his gawking. But instead he just burst into laughter and said a number of profanities, ending with a certain sort of profaneness, perhaps the most purest of them: “Holy shit,” he said, and again but slower: “Holy, shit.” He turned and went out the door. I looked at the kitchen cupboards again and found myself still held in some disbelief about the lack of eggs, then I turned and followed the man out. As I passed through the doorway, I turned and grabbed the door by its top and side and pressed my knee to its center and with a good thrust broke it off its hinges.

“What’re you doing?” the man said.

I turned and heaved the door off the side of the porch and clapped my hands of dust and splinters and picked up the .55-caliber smoothbore. I said, “Ceremonial times are over. Now the ‘coyotes’ can get what they need.”

*~*~*~*

We stopped at the dead creek bed, or perhaps it was a creek bed of the dead. As I drank water from a canteen, being stared at by a lizard perched on a rock, my benefactor took out his folding money again. He drew out way, way more than the twenty-dollars we had agreed on.

“Here.”

I looked at it. I said it was more than we agreed upon.

He nodded. “It sure is.”

I took it. I looked around. Not sure why. Something in me told me it was a joke, so surely someone else had to have been there to carry the laugh. But it was just us.

He said, “Might be a bit of foolery here, but this is no trick.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that. I counted the money. Forty dollars. Forty ones. Possibly more, but I didn’t want to suffer the horror of counting it twice and arriving at a smaller number. I separated the bills out in two fistfuls and deposited them in separate pockets. Don’t want all your eggs in one linen basket, or some such thing. I hid my smile with a word of thanks and an inquiry as to what my benefactor was going to do next.

“I’m going to leave you here, if that is alright,” he said.

I nodded and said it was. We weren’t far off from town, and the return trip had so far been as uncomfortable and positionally unruly as the trip in. I did not once consider myself a man in need of creature comforts, until I had another man’s groin pressed into the small of my back, or until my own groin faced a similar fate in the reverse. Now it seemed the desert suited me, and a brisk walk to town would be a soothing experience, a quiet one, one I could spend time contemplating what in life I enjoyed and what in life I did not enjoy. Solitude quickly finds companionship with good thoughts, as I think my mother said, I don’t quite remember. We used to wheel her around in a wheelbarrow and then set her somewhere and leave for work and when we got back she’d always something to say. Not just anything, but something. She must have had a great congress of thoughts going on around her while we were gone and we were just about always gone. On our return she’d ask us what we learned in our workdays but we never had an answer. Too busy to think, and too tired to catch up on what could’ve been thought. After she was gone, I’ll admit something: I sat in that wheelbarrow myself sometimes thinking it might help me divine things the way she did. But it didn’t. I ended up trading it for a headstone and dadgummit if I didn’t end up trading that headstone for a bowl of porridge.

“I’m going to buy a Motorwagen,” my benefactor said. He looked at me. “You don’t know what that is, do you?”

I shook my head.

“It’s new. It rides on wheels. Makes a lot of noise, and makes this here beast a redundancy,” he said, slapping the horse on the hindquarters, and the animal turned gently and rid itself of some panniers which rolled about in the sand and as the man leaned down to pick them up the horse pinned its ears and kicked him with a snap of a leg and a flick of the fetlock. The man’s skull cracked like a pistol shot and he dropped right onto his face. A cloud of man-shaped dust lifted from the borders of his posture before it all went drifting across the desert and hissing over some cactuses and weathering a blinking lizard. Out there somewhere a coyote stirred and began its yipping. Myself, well, I stood there waiting for him to get up.

“Sir?” I said, prodding his boot with mine. “What is a redundancy, sir? Mister?”

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