The Hanging of Billy Crabtree

Judge Davis’s voice boomed in the dry heat. “Billy Crabtree, I sentence you to death by hanging for eleven counts of train robbery and three counts of murder. Do you have any last words?”

Billy’s horse stirred in the dirt under the oak tree. His hands were tied and he couldn’t turn his neck. “Judge? Reverend? Sheriff? This noose is too dang tight.”

Judge Davis stepped forward to examine the knot. But Sheriff McMurty, eager to get his morning coffee, slapped the horse’s ass, causing it to bolt. Billy’s body tried to follow, but his head swung under the tree while the noose cinched around his throat, cracking his neck bones. The sleeve of muscle at the base of his skull couldn’t sustain his weight, and a clipped shout issued from somewhere as Billy’s head popped off like a toy doll’s and flew straight into the river.

Reverend Peterson was mid-prayer when Billy’s decapitated body slid off the horse and landed on its butt, bolt-upright, on the ground. Sheriff McMurty and Judge Davis watched, dumbfounded, as dark matter shot out the neck hole—an oil well gone-a-gusher. To their astonishment, what flowed was not blood, but small locomotives—like functional toys, but laden with raw steel and lumber, spiraling out in intestine-like coils and landing, fully operational, in the dirt, leaving tracks behind them. Next came passenger cars, and a concomitant flurry of papers—deeds, mortgages, mill paychecks—all blasting out like a flock of white doves circling above the great orgasm of progress continuing to explode from the bandit’s headless body.

Sheriff McMurty pointed his six-shooter at the gush of horse-drawn combines, diesel tractors, and termite-like laborers digging tunnels. But he was a planet—too enormous to be visible to the streetcars, followed by horseless carriages, with their attendant telegraph lines, Victrolas, chattering machine guns, and dancing girls—all in an endless, tiny chorus line, kicking high, kicking low, off into the blue sky.

Then came the flying contraptions. The sheriff laughed when he realized the sole purpose of these flocks of cylindrical winged train cars was to drop dynamite on hospitals, schools, and cathedrals. His guffaws deepened as they stepped back to make room for their ultimate achievement: a slow-motion mushroom cloud rising from the now ruined city; a triumph of industrial mega-death, all birthed from Billy’s hemorrhaging neck hole.

This mass immolation was its last hurrah. The three men stood, dumbfounded, as Billy Crabtree’s body, an empty husk, fell over.

The sheriff pushed up his brimmed hat and scratched at his hairline. “Years of watching people die had me thinking a man’s head was a spigot. Turns out it’s more of a cork.”

A population of tiny, chanting brown people congregated around the reverend’s boot. The man of the cloth squinted at the procession before bringing his moonlike heel down, grinding their entire culture into the dirt. “The devil has revealed himself today.”

“My ass. What’s devilish is how much complicated shit got caught up in such a worthless jackass.”

Judge Davis spoke to the sheriff. “Union Pacific stopped construction for nearly eighteen months because of the Crabtree gang’s payroll robberies.”

“So?”

“They halted the westward expansion. Meaning young Billy here was that cork that stopped up progress.” The judge’s voice was low, portentous. “Maybe that’s how the future works, Sheriff. That the lowliest of low-lives may alter the flow of history in profound ways.”

The sheriff reasoned that while no bringer of fancy mushroom-shaped death-clouds, surely that Navy Colt holstered at his hip could liberate more futures than a noose. Curious, he aimed its pointy barrel at the judge, whose eyes widened with panic until he pointed the thing at the reverend, instead. Then bang. The bullet entered below the man of God’s wagging chin and punched a hole through the top of his head—out of which flowed more little people, this time, marching with building fragments, like ants carrying leaf-litter. Before the men’s eyes those parts—a cross they turned to lumber; a church bell, to steel slabs—became a school, which in time grew into a great swarming river of youthful promise radiating outward from the reverend’s head wound, like the shimmering silk strands of a spider’s web.

What followed was a train, pulling a fancy caboose with red, white, and blue bunting. Legions of speck-like women ran after it, ripping off corsets and bustles in an endless parade of what the sheriff assumed to be microscopic indecency, but was—in actuality—the birth of a new age. Woman president. Women statesmen. Women scientists. Electric streetcars, and eventually, another flying contraption: this time, an arrow that shot into the sky with a blast not unlike the mushroom cloud, but without the accompanying mass death. Instead, a rainbow of planets formed a map to heaven that spiraled across the valley like a never-ending pearl necklace.

The sheriff whistled. “Well dang…”

Judge Davis fell to his knees. In tears, he dragged the sheriff’s still-smoking gun to his forehead. “Make me a god in death.”

The sheriff regarded the bodies of Billy Crabtree and Reverend Peterson. “Judge Davis.” His voice booming with newfound preacher’s gravitas, he pointed his gun at his own right temple. “Bear witness to the future.”

McMurty squeezed the trigger. The last images in his mind were of dancing girls, world-altering bombs, and arrows to the firmament. But what came out of the wound was two, then three tiny men arguing in the street, kicking dust on each other’s boots. Then a dead body. Then a new saloon, plunked down where the sheriff’s office used to be, dealing faro, blackjack; blaring piano, all hours; liquoring, carousing; men running wild in the streets like coyotes.

The blood dried after the train tracks drifted away. And the general store and saloon went quiet.

Then came tumbleweeds.

Tiny, tiny tumbleweeds.

* * *

Ⓒ H. A. Eugene