Bark looked at his brother and felt sick at his closeness to the mule. “It doesn’t matter,” said Bark. “The thing will be dead soon.”
Scraw nodded. “I guess,” he said.
Bark grabbed an axe off the wall. “No,” he said. “There’s no guessing to it. It’s our obligation to make it so. It is in our job description that when we’re asked to slaughter we slaughter. It is not in our job description to discern the intention behind the winks of mules or to spot something larger in the fabric of our ability to soothe a mule out of a panic sparked by the stench of old deaths.” Bark took the axe to a sharpening stone, worked the edge of the blade against it. “You’re soft toward animals,” he said, “and while I don’t wholly understand it, I’m sympathetic to your condition, because I grew up watching you follow sheep into the field and naming the breakfast eggs before you cracked ’em,” he said, “and I feel sorry for you, in some fashion, because you’ve that heart inside you and this job as your livelihood, but I do believe, in the core of me I swear it, that much of the lamentation you’re forced into is because of behaviors you’ve decided on for yourself, and I further believe, again from my center, that you could just as easily decide from the get go ‘this is a mule, a stupid mule, and I’m going to kill it, and that I don’t care if it does wink at me, or if I can calm it, because killing the thing is my job.’” Bark finished sharpening the axe blade, and he raised the axe to his brother. Scraw just looked at the wooden handle of it, worn smooth from use and stained away from its original pine shade by bloodshed. “Take it,” said Bark. “Don’t make me angry at you.”
Scraw ran his hand up and down Murm’s back. He put his nose close to the animal’s mane and breathed deeply the acrid smell of the animal. He looked in his brother’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t believe I’m able.”
Those unfamiliar with the siblings might’ve witnessed this dispute as an indication of each respective brother’s role in their collective endeavors as butcher, barbers, and doctors to the town; however, the evidence emerging from the conflict would prove mildly misleading, as the natures of the brothers’ services in day to day proceedings were divided along far less virtuous lines. It was not: Bark the butcher and Scraw the healer. It was: Bark the doer and Scraw the porter. That is to say: Bark butchered, slaughtered, attempted to heal, and gave haircuts. Scraw cleaned, cooked, and kept house. He ran errands. He took notes.
If the task was pedestrian, it belonged to Scraw. If the task bared some significance and affected some manner of drastic, perceptible change, it was Bark’s.
This was not the first time Bark had attempted to bestow a fraction of his duties onto his brother in an attempt to cure his deep-seated sensitivities; however, this was the first time that Bark had ventured to press Scraw to go so far as kill. Prior experiments in this regard were confined to ridding Scraw of his aversion to cutting hair or fabricating meat—all things, in Bark’s opinion, that seemed easy even for the most genteel characters to execute, but Scraw was averse to these actions.
“I get nauseous at the sound of the scissors,” he had told Bark, and when Bark would cut Scraw’s hair, Scraw would plug his ears with his fingers.
As for parceling beef or venison or bison or birds, Scraw didn’t offer up reasons. He merely kept his fists clenched and said, “No,” when offered the butchering blade.
“You can cook it,” said Bark. “What’s the difference?”
But Scraw just shook his head, said, “I can’t explain it.”
Here, however, was a much further campaign with the aim of mending Scraw’s defective character.
“Take the axe, Scraw,” Bark said, his whole form clenching with annoyance at his brother’s reluctance.
It had been some years since Bark had grown irritated enough at his brother to render harm to his person, but Scraw saw in his current posture some echo of the fury which had preceded the last violence visited to him at Bark’s hands, and, with a reluctance unfathomable, an electric hesitation that seemed to skip on his bones, Scraw let his trembling hand extend toward the implement of slaughter, but, as soon as the wooden handle stroked the skin of his fingers, he pulled the hand back and hid his face with it and whimpered, “I can’t.”
Then, the oddest thing transpired. Scraw looked down into Murm’s eye, and he saw in it, against the black ball in the socket, first himself reflected and then a future. It was opaque, the prospect imaged there, but what the vision lacked in clarity of specifics it made up for in certainty of promise, and Scraw understood everything even before the mule winked again, before the animal let his eyelids fade gently closed then open back imploringly at him, and Scraw knew what he had to do even before Bark yelled at him.
“You’re a goddamned. . .”
“Wait,” said Scraw, and he reached his hand out for the axe.
This disorganized Bark’s operation and he stammered out a bald reaction, stating plainly, “Huh?”
“Give it here,” said Scraw. “Give me the axe.”
Bizarrely, a sort of defeated look glossed over Bark’s eyes, and, when the axe was gone from his grip, he appeared deflated. Perhaps he’d grown so accustomed to his brother’s resistance his form had distended with it, and now, with the hindrance removed, the puss of that swelling leaked out in the world, and the action skinnied him. “You certain?” Bark asked. “You can do this?” he said, but Scraw just hefted the axe over his shoulder and turned his back toward Bark.
Scraw looked down then at Murm. He waited. The brown mule raised his face at him. He waited. The brown mule turned his cheek. He waited. It came again. The mule, for certain, bared his one eye full at Scraw, and, with all the intention that any being could have behind any performance pre-meditated, the mule winked.
Scraw swung then.
He packed all his might into a single swing, the axe racing off his shoulder, slashing its path just over the mule’s head, and Scraw rolled his shoulders to face his brother’s frame.
Bark’s eyes went wide as the axe head whipped around, the blade of the tool torpedoing in a direct line for his chest, where the newly sharpened implement thwacked a burial for itself, the axe mashing Bark’s heart back to its handle, and Bark stepped back as Scraw let go and watched Bark grab haphazardly at where he was gotten several times before his legs gave from shock or death, and Bark fell to the ground in a bloody heap.
IV
Crick learned the man who chewed and spat, the man who’d sent the signal resulting in his capture, went by Kinky Pete, and at that knowledge Crick laughed and bit his thumb.
“Strangers often find that amusing,” Kinky Pete told him, “but it’s on account of my spine.” Pete unbuttoned his flannel shirt and let the smooth fabric drape off his shoulders, and he turned so Crick could see the gnarled backbone that swerved and twisted down away from his skull. “If it were straight,” Pete said buttoning up, “I’d be a half foot taller than I am.”
Crick was locked in one of two cells in the miniature jailhouse adjacent the sheriff’s offices. “Ifs are just wishes we should keep to ourselves,” said Crick.
“Ah,” said Kinky Pete, “you’re just sore we got you put away,” he said, “but remember,” he continued, “it’s for your own safety.”
Crick eyed the black bars of his cage. He gripped two in his hands and pulled back and the cell didn’t as much as rattle. He put his hands to his face and sniffed the metallic odor left behind on his palms and went to his bunk, slunk down on its hardness, said calmly, “It’s not my safety I’m concerned with.”
“Right,” said Kinky Pete, “the. . .” Pete scratched his head, “what did you call them?”
“The mother, mother, mother,” stuttered Crick, “motherfucking sharks.”
“Of course,” said Pete. He rolled his eyes and then there was a knock at the door.
Pete went to it and opened it up.
It was Scraw delivering mule stew for the prisoners.
“How many you got?” Scraw asked.
“Just the one,” answered Kinky Pete, and he took from Scraw a pie plate of stew covered with a scrap of flour sack and a brown paper bag of cornbread hunks, and he turned with the vittles and walked them to Crick’s cell, slid the pie plate beneath the slot in the cage door saying, “mule stew,” and dropped the cornbread through the bars saying, “bread.”
Crick nodded, asked, “Mule stew?”
Kinky Pete nodded, answered, “Yup, your mule.”
Crick stood and walked to the bag, picked it up and looked inside. He took up the pie plate.
“We had the thing slaughtered and cooked up good for you,” said Kinky Pete.
Crick folded back a corner of the flour sack and sniffed at the stew. “Hm,” said Crick, “that’s not mule.”
By now Scraw was gone, but Kinky Pete looked at the door and pointed. “Just ask Scraw next time he’s around,” Pete said, “it’s mule. Your mule. Your-mule stew.”
Crick packed a spoonful of stew into his drawn-open mouth, chewed slackly, said, “I’ve had mule,” said, “this is not that.”
Kinky Pete turned angry, “You calling me liar?” he asked.
“Or merely misinformed,” said Crick.
“I’m neither thing,” said Pete, “and won’t be called such by a crazy man.”
Crick took another bite, “And what,” he asked, “makes you assume,” he chewed, “I’m crazy?”
“To begin with,” said Pete, “the look of you.” Pete washed his gaze over the captive. “You’re inked up and threadbare and ghastly and unbathed.”
Crick swallowed. “I’m dirty,” he said, “I’ve tattoos,” he continued, “but that’s not a sign of insanity.”
“Well,” said Pete, “the talk you talk, then.”
“The talk I talk?”
“Sure. You tell stories unnatural that could only be strained out of the mind of a madman, and the manner in which you travel and present yourself, and how you juggle these,” Pete walked to the wall where Crick’s satchel hung on a peg, and he reached into it and retrieved a skull, which he held eyes-out toward Crick, “and that is madness.”
Crick nodded, “Still,” he said taking a hunk of crumbly cornbread and running it through the stew, “this is not mule. And thus, you’re a liar. Or, misinformed.”
“I’ll not have it,” said Pete.
“Liar,” said Crick.
“I won’t take it,” said Pete.
And Crick said, “Misinformed.”
Pete’s face grew truly nasty at the taunting. He raised the skull above his head as though to slam it to the cement ground, shattering it. “Call it mule,” he said.
“Can’t do it,” said Crick.
“Call it mule, or else.”
“I was taught to never lie,” and he smiled in a grained-toothed manner at Kinky Pete.
“Fine,” said Pete, and he rushed the skull-holding hand at the ground with all his might, the strength of the whole endeavor apparent in his wicked-upped eyes, and he drove the gray human cranium into the ground with a smack that sent shards in several directions, and the chipped-up bone chunk jumped in a ricochet and clipped Pete’s cheek with such force that the skin struck split open and coughed out a stream of hot-red blood that spilled swift down his face, and Pete covered up the gash with the same hand that had done the throwing, and he barked out some unintelligible language of anguish, and then he looked up at Crick.
Crick stayed calm. “Looks like that smarts,” he said, pointing with the spoon.
Pete said nothing. Shock is the surest way to sew shut a proud mouth.
He kept his hand clasped to his face.
He ran out the jail, the whimper of him softly audible over his brisk-thrown steps.
The battered bit of skull that scraped off Pete had rolled against the cage bars, and Crick snagged it up and pulled the broken half of it into his cell. He knew which skull it was when Pete had showed him the eyes. Any of the other skulls would have forced him to say ‘mule.’ But, among the skulls he carried, this one was false. In theory, it belonged to his son, but, in truth, he had no idea whose it was. It was a stray thing he’d picked out of a shark-destroyed dwelling, and not even the original one at that. The first one he’d used in the stead of his son’s had been long since thrown at an annoying woodpecker. The second, he’d given to a whore. He couldn’t remember if this was the third or not.
Crick did not like to think deeply on his two days in captivity in the tiny cage the sharks kept him penned in, but every so often an event forced him back there.
The flavor of murder washed his present-moment eyes black, and the colors of that hideous memory pulled him back into the sick sea wherein he witnessed his family’s mutilation—the tide of his misery drawing him down toward abyss.
Into the cage and the family and the day warm and the day warm humid and the sound of day like light like dust and into the cage the tight bars cutting soft shade from the dullard sun and the sound of mom and the sound of dad and wife and son and the sound of ‘good luck, you can do it’ and the sound of ‘when I say when’ and the sound of ‘when I say when push the cage’ and the sound of into the cage, the lock, and the sound of the lock clipping locked and the sound of into the cage and the day, and the ‘you can do it, got the key?’ and the son’s face and the eyes the eyes of the son the blue the blue gray bright day sound of the eyes in the day and the sound of the son just about to press his weight on the cage and the thought of the, ‘I’m about to fall’ and the thought of ‘will I pull it off?’ and the sound of the remembering in that remembering of how the trick should work and the sound of how the thing would go or not go and the thoughts in that thought of the thought of ‘what if?’ and that thought of ‘what then?’ but the thought then of the form in the mind impossible, the thought of the beast appearing and the thought of the ‘how could it be so?’
And then blood blood
Blood
And then screams screams
Screams
AND
The sound of the motherfucking sharks and the sound of the motherfucking sharks and the sound of
the motherfucking sharks and
the sound of THE
motherfucking
sharks
!
Let us hold now in our minds the image of a man and a boy. The man is Crick, but not the Crick of now or then but the Crick of before we’ve ever seen him. The boy is his child and he is one and a half and he has just said his first word and that first word is ‘Daddy.’ The shape of this word slipping from the tongue of his son puffed Crick with pride, though he’d never imagined the word being associated with him. As a young man, his proclivity toward wayward schemes left the impression on most of those who chanced upon his presence that Crick would one day die wildly and alone, most likely with dirty clothes on. But Crick’s wife—who he met on a riverboat in a romantic entanglement that included drinks with mint as a principal ingredient and porch-colored music played by a blind man with sass—possessed a demeanor that soothed Crick away from debauchery and toward domestication, and since first trading the phrase ‘I love you’ with her, the path of his activities bent away from the wicked. His son’s birth seemed the natural conclusion to anything sordid in his nature, but the boy’s first word being ‘Daddy’ seemed to further cement Crick’s utter rehabilitation.
Crick was a decent man, even if he did still practice magic.
Before the wife, before the boy, Crick used his sleight of hand proficiency as an apparatus toward quackery, his magic just a method toward charlatanism and deception.
Simply put, he stole.
He was one of those troubling characters who could glance against you in a crowd and take your watch and wallet, spectacles and keys, but his charm also enabled in him larger, more blatant heists. He might come to your door selling religious texts and make away with the family piano as a donation toward an orphanage that never existed, and he’d sell the instrument to a friend of yours for a fraction of its worth,
and you’d see it months later at a dinner party and question its origins, and the line of query would lead to the revelation that you’d been swindled and suckered by a man you’d thought sincere.
Family had taken that from him.
Daddy. The word daddy.
If it’s never been aimed at you, you don’t know its worth.
Diotima told Socrates, in his quest to understand love, that “the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old,” and so if you’re ever called daddy, you become a kind of god, because the attribution of the word to your being is testament to the notion that some shadow of your existence cast by the light of time will stretch into the future and echo toward eternity.
Hold now in your mind two moments:
1. Crick being made immortal by his son calling him daddy.
2. That immortality’s bloody revocation when the motherfucking sharks descended upon his son.
And remember both events played out for Crick to witness, and know that the juxtaposition of events in the fold of Crick’s mind crashed him toward devastation.
Let us now think of Crick in the cage while his family’s devoured. He can do nothing but watch or try not to watch. He can do nothing but listen or try not to listen. The smell of blood and rain puddles thickens the air, and the sun stains Crick’s skin as the sharks swim around him.
Sharks ram the cage fruitlessly, their mouths sprawled open to reveal teeth stained by the blood of Crick’s loved ones. Their wicked, vacant eyes lock with Crick’s. They thrash their bodies as they swim through the air.
Motherfucking Sharks Page 3
