The truck stopped briefly and Candy climbed down to scrape the ruined carcass of a raccoon or opossum from the dirt and chucked it into the bed near our feet. Bly groaned and puked onto his shoes and the girls screamed or laughed or both. Dick was a blurry white splotch in the shadows and from the manner he hunched, I suspected he had a finger on the trigger of the revolver in his pocket. Most likely, he figured I’d done in poor, stupid Vernon and was fixing to dust that weasel Bly next, hell maybe I’d go all in and make a play for Mr. Arden. These ideas were far from my mind (well, dusting Bly was a possibility), naturally. Suicide wasn’t my intent. Nonetheless, I couldn’t fault Dick for worrying; could only wonder, between shocks to my kidneys and gut from the washboard track, how he would land if it ever came time to choose teams.
The fiddler swung the truck along a tongue of gravel that unrolled deep inside a bog and we came to a ramshackle hut, a trapper or fisherman’s abode, raised on stilts that leaned every which way like a spindly, decrepit daddy longlegs with a house on its back. Dull, scaly light flickered through windows with tanned skins for curtains and vaguely illuminated the squelching morass of a yard with its weeds and moss and rusty barrels half sunk in the muck, and close by in the shadows came the slosh of Belson Creek churning fitfully as it dreamed. Another truck rolled in behind us and half a dozen more goons wordlessly unloaded and stood around, their faces obscured in the gloom. All of them bore clubs, mattock handles, and gaff hooks.
There was a kind of ladder descending from a trapdoor and on either side were strung moldering nets and the moth-eaten hides of beasts slaughtered decades ago and chains of animal bones and antlers that jangled when we bumped them in passing. I went first, hoping to not reinjure my hand while entertaining visions of a sledgehammer smashing my skull, or a machete lopping my melon at the neck as I passed through the opening. Ducks in Tin Pan Alley is what we were.
Nobody clobbered me with a hammer, nobody chopped me with an axe and I hoisted myself into the sooty confines of Dan Blackwood’s shanty. Beaver hides were stretched into circles and tacked on the walls, probably to cover the knotholes and chinks in a vain effort to bar the gnats and mosquitoes that swarmed the bog. Bundles of fox and muskrat hide were twined at the muzzle and hung everywhere and black bear furs lay in heaps and crawled with sluggish flies. A rat crouched enthroned high atop one mound, sucking its paws. It regarded me with skepticism. Light came from scores of candles, coagulated slag of black and white, and rustic kerosene lamps I wagered had seen duty in Gold Rush mines. The overwhelming odors were that of animal musk, lye, and peat smoke. Already, already sweat poured from me and I wanted another dose of mash.
That sinister flautist Dan Blackwood tended a cast iron stove, fry pan in one fist, spatula in the other. He had already prepared several platters of flapjacks. He wore a pork pie hat cocked at a precipitous angle. A bear skin covered him after a burlesque fashion.
“Going to be one of those nights, isn’t it?” I said as my friends and hangers on clambered through the hatch and stood blinking and gawping at their surroundings, this taxidermy post in Hades.
“Hello, cousin. Drag up a stump. Breakfast is at hand.” Blackwood’s voice was harsh and thin and came through his long nose. At proximity, his astounding grotesqueness altered into a perverse beauty, such were the chiseled planes and crags of his brow and cheek, the lustrous blackness of his matted hair that ran riot over his entire body. His teeth were perfectly white when he smiled, and he smiled often.
The cakes, fried in pure lard and smothered in butter and maple syrup, were pretty fucking divine. Blackwood ate with almost dainty precision and his small, dark eyes shone brightly in the candle flame and ye gods the heat from the stove was as the heat from a blast furnace and soon all of us were in shirt sleeves or less, the girls quickly divested themselves of blouse and skirt and lounged around in their dainties. I didn’t care about the naked chickadees; my attention was divided between my recurrent pains of hand and ear, and gazing in wonder at our satyr host, lacking only his hooves to complete the image of the great god Pan taking a mortal turn as a simple gang boss. We had him alone—his men remained below in the dark—and yet, in my bones I felt it was me and Dick and Bly who were at a disadvantage if matters went south.
“Don’t get a lot of fellows with your kind of bark around here,” Blackwood said. He reclined in a heavy wooden chair padded with furs, not unlike the throne of a feudal lord who was contemplating the fate of some unwelcome itinerant vagabonds. “Oh, there’s wild men and murderous types aplenty, but not professional gunslingers. I hear tell you’ve come to the Hollow with blood in your eye, and who put it there? Why dear little Connie Paxton, of course; the moneybags who rules from his castle a few miles yonder as the crow wings it.”
“Friend of yours?” I said, returning his brilliant smile with one of my own as I gauged the speed I could draw the Luger and pump lead into that hairy torso. Clementine slithered over and caressed my shoulders and kissed my neck. Her husband had been a merchant marine during the Big One, had lain in Davey Jones’s Locker since 1918. Her nipples were hard as she pressed against my back.
Blackwood kept right on smiling. “Friend is a powerful word, cousin. Almost as powerful as a true name. It’s more proper to say Mr. Paxton and I have a pact. Keepin’ the peace so we can all conduct our nefarious trades, well that’s a sacred duty.”
“I understand why you’d like things to stay peaceful,” I said.
“No, cousin, you don’t understand. The Hollow is far from peaceful. We do surely love our bloodlettin’, make no mistake. Children go missin’ from their beds and tender maidens are ravished by Black Bill of the Wood,” he winked at slack-jawed and insensate Abigail who lay against Bly, “and just the other day the good constable Jarred Brown discovered the severed head of his best deputy floatin’ in Belson Creek. Alas, poor Ned Smedley. I knew him, Johnny! Peaceful, this territory ain’t. On the other hand, we’ve avoided full scale battle since that machine gun incident at the Luster court house in 1910. This fragile balance between big predators is oh so delicately strung. And along come you Gatlin-totin’ hard-asses from the big town to upset everything. What shall I do with you, cousin, oh what?”
“Jesus, these are swell flapjacks, Mr. Blackwood,” Bly said. His rummy eyes were glazed as a stuffed dog’s.
“Why, thank you, sirrah. At the risk of soundin’ trite, it’s an old family recipe. Wheat flour, salt, sugar, eggs from a black speckled virgin hen, dust from the bones of a Pinkerton, a few drops of his heart blood. Awful decadent, I’ll be so gauche as to agree.”
None of us said anything until Clementine muttered into my good ear, “Relax, baby. You ain’t a lawman, are you? You finer than frog’s hair.” She nipped me.
“Yes, it is true,” Blackwood said. “Our faithful government employees have a tendency to get short shrift. The Hollow voted and decided we’d be best off if such folk weren’t allowed to bear tales. This summer a couple government rats, Pinkerton men, came sniffin’ round for moonshine stills and such. Leto, Brutus and Candy, you’ve met ’em, dragged those two agents into the bog and buried ’em chest deep in the mud. My lads took turns batterin’ out their brains with those thumpers they carry on their belts. I imagine it took a while. Boys play rough. Candy worked in a stockyard. He brained the cattle when they came through the chute. Got a taste for it.” He glanced at the trap door when he said this.
“Powerful glad I’m no Pinkerton,” I said.
He opened his hand and reached across the space between us as if he meant to grasp my neck, and at the last moment he flinched and withdrew and his smile faded and the beast in him came near the surface. “You’ve been to see those bitches.”