Jasper winked and started to move on. “I might be,” he said over his shoulder, “but at least I’m not payin’ money to lick a whore’s dirty feet.”
Even though he had finally turned the tables on Saunders, his most vocal critic and one of the snootiest pricks to ever come out of Ross County, Jasper was still rattled by the encounter. Because it was the only thing that soothed him when he became upset, he hurried home right after work and took his buffalo gun out of the closet in his bedroom, where he kept it wrapped in an old quilt. Sitting down on the bed in front of a tall mirror, he wiped the long, heavy rifle down with a rag dampened with Hoppe’s Solvent. He began talking to himself as he did so, glancing in the mirror from time to time, pretending that someone was seated across from him listening. “So this Jasper feller,” he said to his reflection, “he decided his town had been dirty long enough and it was time to clean it up, and the first thing he did was go over to Sandy Saunders’s office on Paint Street and, BOOM, he shot the dirty snake’s head off with a buffalo gun his daddy bought at an auction one time up in Frankfort, and, by God, you should have seen the look on the sonofabitch’s face right before ol’ Jasper pulled the trigger, and his brains splattered like red mud against the wall. And then he walked over to the jail and killed both those Wallingford boys and their old man just because they’d let everything go to hell, and then he blasted a hole the size of a…” He talked on and on like this for quite a while, assassinating various city leaders and other higher-ups, ridding the town of filth and corruption once and for all. He was being hailed a hero when he realized he was at it again, losing himself in a fantasy that he kept wishing he had the courage to carry out. Though he did so with regret, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a speech being given by some big-breasted matron in which she was extolling his high morals and princely virtues. She was standing on a stage in the newly renamed Cone Park. Draped behind her was a banner that had the image of a buffalo gun sewn on it, and in the front row sat his father, alive and well and hardly aged at all.
After sitting for a few minutes staring at his now silent image in the mirror, he wrapped the gun in the blanket and stuck it back in the closet. Then he dropped his pants, undid his truss. A thin shaft of yellow sunlight swirling with dust motes shone through a crack in the curtains. Taking out his cock, the bane of his existence and his cross to carry for as long as he walked the earth, he wrapped both hands around it and whipped it against the side of the oak dresser until he wept. He finally quit beating it and took a bloody leak in a bucket sitting in the corner and bunched it back up in his pants. Exhausted by his efforts, he went downstairs and drank a glass of water, then curled up on his mother’s couch and went to sleep with all her old plaster saints watching over him with sadness and understanding and compassion, as saints are wont to do.
31
TWO DAYS AFTER killing the store clerk from Russell, the brothers came to a high granite bluff overlooking a wide river. A mile or so to the west, they could just make out, in the early morning fog, a train crossing over the water on a covered bridge; and to the east, they watched a coal-fired barge come around a curve, pulling a load of raw lumber. They had been riding hard all night. To Chimney’s dismay, most of the arsenal they had collected had to be dumped in a pond after the packhorse split a hoof and couldn’t keep up. A group of men, a dozen or more in number, had been gaining on them steadily. Yesterday evening Cane had caught a whiff of their cook fire as they came up out of a steep, rocky ravine they had hidden in all day. While he pushed forward with a weak and feverish Cob, Chimney had slipped up close to their camp and listened to them as they ate and drunkenly bragged about what they would do with the criminals after they killed them. From what he could gather, a bearded man that the others called Captain was the leader. Sitting on a campstool, he wore an old blue coat with tarnished braids on the shoulders, and a tall hat decorated with shiny bits of foil and a plume of peacock feathers. “As long as we got their heads as proof for the bounty, I don’t give a good goddamn what you do,” he heard him say. “Fuck ’em in the ass for all I care.”
“By God, Cap, that’s a grand idea,” another man said. “Many women as they’ve raped, them sonsofbitches deserve a good cornholing.”
“But do we cut their heads off before we fuck ’em, or after we fuck ’em?” someone else asked.