Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He held his arms out like Christ on the cross. He made a roaring sound, a nonsense sound, which was the best he could do. He had to be slower. He had to stride, even strut. He kept going.

  The garden of fire was relaxing, shrinking, he was glad, because he had been afraid it might set the whole roof on fire and then the building would go and then he would fall through fire. He had almost come here with Iris, which might have been lovely and changed everything between them. Who knows? he thought.

  And now he would be a gem for her, his beloved, a thing in a locket in her mind if anyone could be counted on to record or remember what he was doing, however it went. There was going to be a story in any case whether he won or he lost, and if he lost, it would be Morel downstairs, safe, fucking around, who would tell it. Because he wanted to be a brave thing on her cheating heart forever, the locket of her heart. They could fuck themselves.

  He was close, he was close to the emplacement. This was it. “Go back,” he said.

  And then he said something like Ho, fiercely.

  And then he said, “Go back go back. I have a bomb, go back.” And he said it, shrieked it, again. He hardly recognized his own voice. His voice was a separate thing, separate from him.

  Smoke from the fire-bomb blaze came with him, helping him.

  He wanted to be large, straight as a post, and full, full of obvious danger.

  He stopped ten or so feet from the emplacement, amazed to be still alive, still standing.

  A bullet kicked up pebbles from the roof near his feet, but it came from behind him, from his friends. He wished they would stop now. Everything was up to him. They could stop.

  “Go back,” he shouted again, unnecessarily, because they seemed to have already done that.

  He hesitated about climbing up onto the barrier of ammunition lockers. His instinct was to surmount it gradually, but that was wrong and he knew it. He had to be the opposite of cautious because he was in possession of death. He pulled two of the lockers out of the stack, so he could enter this new district of hell. The lockers were empty. They were heavy things but they were empty. They were fakes.

  He expected to be dead shortly. He climbed through the breach in the lockers.

  “Go back and put your guns down. Throw them down,” he shouted, arriving among the enemy.

  They were cowering back and there were fewer of them than he had calculated there would be.

  “I will blow you to death,” he shouted, embarrassed at the formulation.

  They were believing him, the seven or eight villains, no only seven, that were there packed in around their cumbersome big artillery which was now useless to them, couldn’t be aimed at him, because he was there and they were believing he was the angel of death.

  “You don’t want to die,” he said. He said it to Quartus. Quartus was to the rear of the position, near the third heavy gun. He was wearing sun goggles. He was not smiling.

  Ray had to stop telling them to put their guns down, he realized. Because they had only been employing their mounted guns, one at the back and two at the front, and relying on their superior force and range to keep the witdoeke back and bit by bit chop their position to pieces. Their automatic rifles were stacked to one side. They had been overconfident. Quartus did have a holstered pistol strapped on.

  “You, you fuck, put your hands high. You hear me?” Quartus put his hands up. Ray couldn’t believe it.

  Ray knew he had to be swift. He was an illusionist and the illusion was not going to work for long.

  He was creating unhappiness. He strode to the cache of automatic rifles and stood over it. If he ever got reinforcements he would toss the rifles off the roof. He wanted Quartus’s pistol but he didn’t want to approach him to get it. He didn’t want scrutiny.

  “Take off your belt,” he said to Quartus.

  Quartus was moving too slowly in complying. Ray knew what to do. It was time to bring his own rifle into play. It was delicate, switching to a different way of menacing these bastards, because they might all jump at him in a rage when they realized his bomb was not a bomb, as they would soon enough. And then he would be forced to spray death at them, real death.

  They might think that since he couldn’t kill all of them it would make sense for them to rush him. He had to get them on their bellies spread-eagled. It was going to be hard on them. There were the burning pebbles to contend with and there were glittering and equally burning hot spent shells everywhere, strewn everywhere. And he had to get Quartus disarmed and under control. Quartus was operating in slow motion. He was looking for an opening. But his rage was evident. He was nonplussed. I love it, Ray thought.

  “I said to take your belt off. Let your pistol fall. Do what I tell you.”

  He had to get everyone in a single clump, down on their faces, all of them, the six underlings and Quartus the boss. The six were conveniently arrayed side by side sitting on a low bench. They had responded beautifully to the threatening motions he was making with his AK. They had been drinking, if the empty beer cans in evidence around the position meant anything. Also they had been eating canned pineapple. Ray began to salivate. These bastards had had it cozy, with their beer, water bottles, cigarettes, parasols. There was a tarpaulin stretched over a framework and in the shade it provided were two cots. They had been able to get out of the sun if they’d wanted to, in shifts.

  There was a surprising amount of equipment and gear collected there, which meant there must be another route of access from below at this end of the roof. He could see where it was. It was a large trapdoor, much larger than the one covering the stair-ladder access he had come up, at the center of the roof. Awkward objects had been brought up. The machine gun stands were bolted to heavy wooden skids. The good thing was that the trapdoor lid was locked, or shut securely, rather, with the hasp of an open combination lock passed through the hoop closure at the rim. There would be no surprises coming from that source, at least.

  Quartus had dropped his belt and the pistol had fallen to the roof, still in its holster.

  “Kick it this way,” Ray shouted.

  Quartus complied, but feebly. Ray knew what Quartus would do next. He would kick the holster and belt as hard as he could in the direction of the other villains, on the chance that one of them could make a grab for it. That was not going to happen.

  “Step back all the way,” Ray said to Quartus. He wanted him in the right-hand angle of the parapet, away from the mounted gun pointed down into the pan, away from anything. And then he would bring him around to join his fellow villains on his belly on the roof.

  Quartus had taken his sun goggles off, ripped them off. He was staring at Ray. He had wanted to see if what he was seeing could possibly be right, that a naked man with some kind of box on his chest was indeed in charge of events and that the box on his chest was not a bomb.

  It was urgent that he get the six foot soldiers down, flat, out of the way.

  “Lie down, all of you! All you six, you lie down, ribama.” Ribama meant stomach in Setswana. Robala meant lie down, but it meant lie down and go to sleep.

  They knew what to do, and they were spreading their arms without being told. And they were groaning.

  “What are you playing at?” Quartus screamed. He was alarmingly red in the face. He was normally ruddy, but this was a new level of color.

  “I’m not playing. I’ll kill you if you don’t listen to me,” Ray shouted.

  “You prick, look at you! Your prick is showing. Cover your prick. I see they have let you out …”

  “Ah no, meneer, I broke out of your prison. Hahaha.”

  “You are going to die, I tell you that.”

  “You move into the corner where I’m pointing. Go. I’ll kill you if you’re slow about it, meneer. And you say nothing to me from now on, nothing. Put your hands higher than that. The catch is up on my rifle.”

  Quartus was beginning to obey, beginning to edge in the direction he had been ordered to take. Ray was feeling gratified. He had
let his penis show, let it be there like nothing more exotic than a nose or an elbow, because that had been what was required. It was a personal victory, a thing he had done for the cause. The hair in Quartus’s armpits was red.

  Quartus shouted something in Afrikaans. Ray had an idea that what he was saying was that Ray was carrying a fake bomb around, not a real bomb. He couldn’t be allowed to talk again.

  “I warned you, meneer,” Ray shouted. And he pressed the trigger of his rifle, pressed it as tentatively and lightly as he could, intending to release a very short burst, not more than five bullets. The violence of the burst surprised him, and the volume of the fire he had released. He had used at least ten or a dozen bullets. He was trying furiously to remember how many shots there were, in the magazine. He had to be frugal. Quartus would be counting. He had only the one magazine with him.

  Quartus was limping. Ray had directed his fire at the roof near Quartus’s feet. He hadn’t intended to hit him. He was sorry if he had.

  The shooting had been salutary in its effect on the foot soldiers. Any restlessness among them was gone. They were unmoving. They were like carvings.

  Quartus was where he should be, sitting on the parapet far to the right, his hands still raised. His legs looked all right. Ray didn’t know why he had seemed to be limping. It might have been a trick. Anything could be a trick.

  Ray thought, This interlude has to stop being an interlude. He needed help. He needed reinforcements. He needed his friends to come to his aid. Where were they? He needed to get out of the sun. In fact he needed to get his naked penis out of the sun, especially. Because the two items of the body most susceptible to sun damage were, if he remembered what Iris had said on the subject, the penis and, sort of oddly, the eyelids. It had come up during a discussion of nude beaches. In any case he wanted his penis to accompany him into the next stage of his life. He might need it.

  His ears were ringing. It was astonishing to him that technology had failed to address the fucking deafening racket guns made.

  He was noticing something important at the back of the shelter housing the two cots. His attention had been drawn there by Quartus, who had been glancing nervously in that direction. And the important something was a radio setup. There was an aerial mast sticking up. He had missed it. He felt stupid for having missed it.

  I will blow it to hell, he thought. He crouched and aimed and fired and his bullets tore the thing to pieces. But he had used more ammunition than he’d intended, again. Quartus was screaming at him. That meant Ray had done a good thing.

  It was too difficult keeping his menacing attention equally on Quartus where he was and the foot soldiers where they were.

  “Come over here, now,” he shouted at Quartus. Quartus stood up. He seemed to be smiling about something.

  “No, get down and crawl, meneer. Crawl to me.”

  Quartus was wearing a tank top and jodhpurs. He loved jodhpurs, apparently. He was moving slowly. He was continuing to smirk. Ray didn’t like it.

  Witdoeke should be on hand. He wanted to know why they hadn’t shown up. Something was amiss.

  Ray looked back along the roof and saw instantly what the problem was. He was appalled. He couldn’t allow himself to look for more than a moment at the calamity developing behind him. It felt like a calamity, but possibly it was only going to develop into one.

  There was a broken wall of fire stretching across the roof, the offspring of the Molotov cocktail blaze that had preceded his foray, a blaze that had seemed to be declining but that was now robust. He could see why Mokopa had probably been holding back on the Molotov cocktails. This was a tarred roof. There was tar under the pebbles. A fire had gotten going in the tar. It wasn’t a conflagration, at least not yet. No it was at the stage where if everybody cooperated it could be beaten out, villains and rebels together. The problem was the quantity and blackness of the smoke being generated. Tar was something used in wars to produce smoke screens.

  So the fact was that his friends were in the dark about his accomplishments, which now that he thought about it pretty much resembled his situation in life, not that he had ever had that many friends. But you digress, he thought. So his friends were unaware of what he had accomplished in the enemy camp. It wasn’t right. It was too much. Too much is enough, he thought.

  But at least Quartus was doing as he’d been told, crawling along the rooftop toward him like a dog. And he was a dog. Except that no man is a dog. And No Isle Is a Mainland was one of his dead brother’s gems. He was afraid. He was in peril. He was weakening. He had to perform strength. He wanted to wrap a towel around his waist in behalf of his penis. He couldn’t. He was fully occupied. There were no towels. This was not a locker room.

  The witdoeke had no idea what he had accomplished. The dog Quartus crawling toward him knew. But everything was precarious because everything was precarious. All he had to offer, all he really had to offer, was his willingness to kill. They had to believe that, the villains did. He would do it. But he wanted to tell someone what he was going to have to do, to do soon. It was all over for his mock bomb, he knew that. He was sure all of the villains had figured that out. And here was the snake Quartus crawling toward his subordinates like a dog. And Quartus was saying something out of the side of his mouth. There was the word piel in what he was saying, whispering loudly, which Ray just happened to know meant penis, prick, in Afrikaans.

  The witdoeke should be arriving, fast. They would like what they would find. There was plenty for them. There were at least two mortar tubes they could take and put to use and there were the shells with little fins on them like little fat goldfish, which had to be around somewhere, unless they had been used up. He didn’t know about that. There was booty. Come quick, boys and girls, and help me, he thought.

  He motioned Quartus to lie down with the foot soldiers, but not among them, at the outer part of the cluster, nearest him, so that Quartus would kindly reduce the number of targets Ray had to be prepared to aim at from two to just one.

  Quartus was still talking subtly. It had to stop. Quartus was whispering. He could die for that, if he kept it up.

  Someone had to come to help. There was a ding or a thing going on deep in his body like the tickle that tells you twenty minutes before it happens that you are going to vomit. But this was about fainting. And there was the rub, because if it got any worse before he got help he was going to have to commit murder, kill everyone. The sun was to blame. It was the sun and it was everything else.

  He had to get control of the thing, the ting, like hearing the librarian’s desk bell ting when he was deep in the stacks, far from her desk but hearing it, clear, and knowing it was time to go, it was closing time.

  Piercing whistles sounded from behind him. That was good news. Of course they didn’t know he couldn’t respond, if that was what they were looking for.

  He was thinking odd things. He remembered the faces of the librarians in his life, especially the ones from his youth, with peculiar definiteness and clarity, compared to, say, the faces of tradesmen, the postmen, or even the teachers whose hands he had passed through, whose faces he had stared directly at for hours on end. He was thinking odd things. Quartus had roan-red axillary hair and he was thinking that in his life he had never before seen truly red armpit hair. He couldn’t believe his life experience had been so limited. But there it was. It had. So he was going to have to kill a unique specimen, unique as far as he was concerned.

  The whistling was closer and more urgent. It meant that his comrades were on the move, coming. He wanted his brother to come back from the dead and whistle for him, whistle anything.

  The people under his control didn’t like the whistling. The group as a whole was responding as a single organism. It was stiff, stiffer. They probably had their own repertoire of whistles, signaling-whistles.

  Little things were going on that he had no time for. The tarpaulin over the cots and the radio set was in flames, adding to the merriment.

  His capti
ves were all looking at him out of the sides of their eyes. There was more smoke coming in their direction. He began to cough.

  The boy stood on the burning deck, he thought. He could smell mutiny among his captives.

  They had to believe he would kill them.

  He knew what he had to think, or rather not think but be, and he could do it. He had to be Satan, he had to be Satan saying Evil, be thou my good, Book Four. He tried to inhale this thought.

  Abruptly, Quartus stood up and ran at Ray.

  “I am going to kill you, you poefter,” he screamed, astonishingly to Ray, ignoring the gun in his face and grasping at the packet on Ray’s chest, this time, flinging himself fully against Ray and trying to do something clever. He was trying to twist the neck tapes into a noose, trying to detach the packet from its main bindings around the back, and strangle Ray in the neck bindings by twisting the packet around and around. But his fingers were slippery with blood and Ray saw what he was trying to do and got the gun barrel up into Quartus’s stomach, which calmed the man.

  Quartus fell away from him. He fell on his side and then sat up.

  They glared at each other.

  “Go back with them,” Ray said. He wanted them all in one place again, his enemies, all compact. This time he would kill them if anyone forced his hand. He could do it. It had helped him, surviving Quartus’s best efforts. Helped his resolve. He had reserved the power to kill them and he hoped they would see that that made him more formidable. He could take a minute to congratulate himself so far. He was a leaning tower but he was still in charge. One thing that had helped him defeat Quartus had been his nakedness. His legs, his body, everything was slick with nervous sweat. So there had been utility in his madness, if not method, exactly. And Quartus had not helped himself in the struggle by being drunk. He had been drunk. He had smelled of alcohol. And he had been erratic. But it was true that groups like these drank just routinely.

  “You, you go back,” he said again. Quartus was stirring but not really moving.