Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [139]
“That’s just right.” She nodded to Lloyd. “Now, none of you boys have had the stones to answer my question, which surprises me not one bit. You there, Joshua you called yourself? As if I should know or care. Well, my name is Fanny Ockleman—Fast Fanny to you. But once upon a time I used to be a schoolteacher. A terror, they called me when it came to discipline. Do you know what I did with unruly boys? Boys who showed no respect and thought they could bullyrag others?”
The whole street was silent. Even the animals seemed to be listening.
“I caned them, Joshua. I caned their hides for all to see.”
Hoots and catcalls went up around the gathering, and various children and stragglers dashed down the planks to spread the word. Joshua Breed had lost his pants and his wits and was going to get a whuppin’ by a gun-totin’ woman with a good start on a beard. Oh, this was too sweet to miss!
But the woman who called herself Fanny Ockleman did not take the cane switch from Lloyd, but instead directed him over toward the hapless Breed, who groveled in the mud. The trail buddy farthest away hightailed it off like a bleating goat. The other one, who had dropped the rifle, made a lunge for it, and had it shot from his grasp, so that the butt splintered and cut his face. He groped for his trousers and pivoted to flee in one motion—but the next shot forced him to dive for a horse trough, which he splashed into like a sack of corn heaved from a wagon, producing a roar of laughter from the spectators.
The news had reached the attention of what passed for the law in town, but, still reeling from the events of the previous night, with one of his deputies having been among the blinded vigilantes, and no love for the Breeds, who more or less ruled the vicinity, the so-called sheriff was not quick to try to assert authority now. Josh Breed knew that, with his friends on the run or incapacitated, he could not count on any help that would come in time. He peered up through bloodshot eyes and saw the little boy he had threatened with the whip striding toward him with the cane.
“Son,” Fanny intoned, lowering her guns. “I want you to give that blowhard a good licking. Five of the finest you can deliver. And one more for good measure.”
“You bitch!” Breed screamed, clawing at the mud with bullet-grazed mitts—desperate to scramble upright and grab for Lloyd all at once. He wanted to bite that blasted woman’s throat out. But he did not even manage to make it up to his haunches before Fanny had grazed his shin with another bullet, just as she had meant to do. Breed plopped forward, facedown in the street, his long-johnned rear end exposed now to Lloyd and the upraised cane.
“You know what to do,” Fanny called to Lloyd across the street, and expertly spat a full three feet without losing her cheroot. “Five of the best you can give, and one more to make the memory sore.”
While all this had been happening, Rapture had been beside herself with worry for Lloyd, and now to see him actively engaged gave her a rushing sense of disorientation, not unlike what she had experienced when the odd music box was opened back at the Clutters’. She saw him once again as utterly remote from her. He seemed to fit into the scene before her like a piece of puzzle slotted into position, and the thought filled her heart with dread. There was something monstrous in him that she could not accept as having come from inside herself. Truly, he seemed more the child of this man-witch, who had brought the beasts of the frontier village under her spell with an eerily composed violence of the kind that is not learned easily and was somehow invested with an