Ghost Town: A Novel by Robert Coover Page B

at his buckskin breeches, but they’re a tight fit; he can get them down off his butt but not past the snakebite on his thigh: they’re like a second skin. Already his thigh and groin are swelling up and changing color and he’s starting to feel sick. He knows he should suck the poison out but the bite’s in a place he can’t reach, even if he could get his pants down. So he cuts into the punctures through the pantleg with his bowie knife and squeezes the blood and pus out as best he can, feeling his whole body begin to puff up and turn feverish.
    He figures he’s done for, but then he spies the town over on the horizon, shimmering in the heat. It’s his only chance. He tosses his gunbelt over his shoulder and, in a cold sweat, staggers off in that direction, stumbling, falling, picking himself up and carrying on. The poison’s getting to him. Sometimes the town is out there, sometimes it isn’t. He sees a soft quilted bunk that fades into sagebrush when he reaches it, a watering hole which turns into a dry gully when he falls into it, mouth open, face in the sand.
    Lying there, grit in his teeth, he seems to recollect—it’s sort of a memory and it sort of happens—accompanying a wagon train of emigrants heading west across the dusty plains. He might have been a hired gun or a scout or he might himself be one of the pioneers, it’s not clear, but their passage takes them through endless black acres of burnt-out prairie grass, dust churned up by the wooden wheels so thick wet bandannas tied over their faces cannot filter it out (he can taste it, coating his tongue, clogging his throat), the teams of oxen plodding through it all, their hickory yokes squeaking, chains rattling, and there’s the tinkling clatter of tinware, the shriek of ungreased axles, the squalling of children; he can hear all this. Storms suddenly rise up out of nowhere and sweep wrathfully down upon them, lightning bolts slamming the ground around them like electrical cannonballs, and then as quickly they sweep away again, leaving the land as hot and dusty as if no rain had passed.
    In the calm after one such storm, just as they are crawling out from under the oiled canvases of their wagons, they are attacked by a band of screaming wild Indians on horseback, emerging as though out of the vanishing storm itself, their naked bodies striped head to toe with red and black paint, their long ebon hair floating to the wind, bald eagles’ feathers on their heads and strips of flayed antelope skin and white feathery skunks’ tails strung to their knees and elbows—they make a sight to see, though looking can get a person turned into a human pincushion. Already the settlers are falling—men, women, and children, their horses and oxen, too—with arrows through their throats, chests, and eyeballs. He seems to recognize them all but doesn’t know them, except for that beautiful widow woman in black, the schoolmarm from the town up ahead, moving among the fallen, treating their injuries, consoling the dying, keeping wounded and orphaned children distracted by teaching them their ABCs.
    He’s having a hard time thinking, he hurts so badly and feels so sick, but he manages somehow, hitching about on his one good leg, wincing with pain and nausea, to get all the covered wagons snaked round in a circle, tongues chained to rear axles, as a makeshift breastwork against the incessant hail of deadly arrows. The clumsy wagons teeter and tip and Dutch ovens, rocking chairs, and butter churns spill out like peace offerings, plows, skillets, chamber pots, and bucksaws, a proliferation of translated merchandise that dizzies him, or perhaps exemplifies the dizziness that besets him. He and the remaining settlers knuckle down—he hears cavalry trumpets in the distance but they are stifled mid-toot, hope lost, they’re strictly on their own here—to the business of killing savages, which they accomplish in great numbers; popping them off their ponies is like