Blood Sport

by Robert F. Jones

  “Can you make out the taller guy, back there against the boulders?” I asked my son.

  “No . . . Yeah, now I can see him. With the rifle on his hip.”

  “It looks more like a shotgun—our pump.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. He has his hand on the slide—that’s what threw me off.”

  “Okay, I’m going to slip around and get up above him on that bluff. I should be able to hit him with the Luger from there. What I want you to do is belly on down to the river—through this draw, right here, where were sitting—and then work your way through the shallows under cover of those rocks along the bank, and then nail the smaller guy where he’s holding the horses. Shoot for the body; no head shots—I don’t want you to miss him. Then when you’ve shot, I’ll hit the big guy, and back you up if the small guy’s only wounded.”

  “Okay.”

  “But remember, if you miss your man the first shot, don’t get up or show yourself at all. Just lie low and reload. I’ll cover you. If you hear me yell, start working your way back here slowly and quietly and pick up our gear and split back down the river. Got it?”

  “Check-o,” he said, and threw me a sickly grin.

  25

  I WATCHED HIM start down the draw, the crossbow delicate in his left hand and the bolts tucked securely through his belt. A terrible thing to send a boy to do. His mother would never approve. Ambush. Yet wasn’t ambush what it was all about? We had ambushed each other, this boy’s mother and I, and the rest of our lives, anyone’s life, was a battle back out of the ambush. The trick was to emerge on the far side of the ambush with the enemy your friend. Easy enough to kill, but very tough making friends. I slid up over the rocks and began moving in on the bigger thief, the one with my 12-gauge pump in his hand. I trembled—was it Ratnose? Was this my moment? The rocks were warm and smooth, dead silent, without rubble. I drew the bead on him. . . . I could see . . .

  I could see by the profile that this wasn’t Ratnose. In a way, I had known all along it wasn’t Ratnose. Not this easy—not Ratnose this easy. This man was too clean to be Ratnose; he stood too straight, his shoulder blades holding him out like cantilevers from the warm stone wall. He wore a mackinaw, not fur. His nose was aquiline, not sharp. Disappointment flooded through me, followed instantly by doubt: should we kill them? But it was too late now. Orders given. Where was the kid? I could see the smaller thief standing there by the sucking horses, wearing a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat and . . . yes, a fur coat! Maybe Ratnose! Maybe . . .

  The bolt hit the smaller thief before I heard the slap of the crossbow’s string. The horses reared and plunged as the small thief disappeared into the shadows—my eyes were shifting from horses to fallen body to my own man, concentrating on the trigger squeeze from a butt rest on the sandstone—and then the horses were moving, bucking and clattering up over the river bed rocks so that I feared they would snap their cannon bones, and spang! the Luger went off with a ricochet off the rocks below. No hit on my man. Spang! Again no hit—my man was now down and swinging the pump gun my way. Chug-a-pow!—the buckshot chewing great chunks of sandstone out of the cliff behind me—and spang-thunk! I’d hit him. I heard him grunt. The shotgun slid and rattled down through the rocks below where the hit man lay. I looked past my man to where the other thief had been standing. Sure enough, there was a body down on the riverside rocks.

  “Okay,” I yelled to my son, “we’ve got ’em. If you’re reloaded, come on out, but keep your guy covered.”

  It was almost dark now—just the red glow from the rocks, the high clouds carrying the knife edge of the dying day. My man lay on his back among the round boulders, still alive and staring at me. My bullet had clipped his spine just above the hips. His hat was couched at the back of his head like a pillow. He looked familiar. It was Johnny Black. My old buddy from trapping days . . .

  “Hey!” my son screamed from down at the riverbank. “This isn’t any witchman. It’s an old woman.”

  I searched Johnny Black for weapons, took a knife off his hip, picked up the shotgun, and climbed down through the boulders to where my son stood over the small body. It was an old woman, all right, heart- and lung-shot, with blood pooled in her toothless grin. She was unarmed. Her eyes slid out of focus toward the sunset.

  “She looks like Grandma,” said my son. Then he started crying. Comforting him, I wondered how often she would have to die. As often as Ratnose?

  26

  I TURNED THE OLD WOMAN’S head sideways to drain the blood from her mouth and then went through her pockets. The blood, already congealing, permeated the sandstone as if it were a blotter. The fur coat was splendid—wolfskin fringed around the hood with wolverine to keep the frost of the wearer’s breath from icing up. It was scarcely damaged by the fatal shot: the crossbow bolt had punched through the left breast side, penetrated and killed the old woman, and then stopped without ripping the far side of the coat. An easy repair job with a needle and a length of fishing line. I stripped off the coat, taking care not to bloody it, and then extracted the crossbow bolt. My son was still snuffling, hunkered back on his haunches against the boulders. I told him to take the bolt and wash it off in the river, then go up and cover Johnny Black with the Luger, provided he was still alive.

  “Who’s Johnny Black?”

  “The guy I just shot to get back your dump truck,” I said. “I used to know him when I was a kid. He’s a Wyandot Indian trapper, an old man—this woman’s old man, actually. Years ago, a friend of mine and I saved him from a bandit gang—Ratnose’s gang.”

  “Who’s Ratnose?”

  “His real name is Ratanous,” I said. “Some people say he’s French-Canadian—an old coureur de bois and roustabout who makes nothing but trouble for the right folks along the Hassayampa. But I don’t know for sure. He speaks with a Mexican accent and looks Chinese. When I met him, he was leading a Chinese bandit gang, but I’ve heard stories about him leading other no-goods, too. He’s old and tough and mean. We’re damned lucky it was Johnny rather than Ratnose who swiped our stuff. Ratnose would have preferred killing us to any simple thievery. Now get on up there and keep a watch on the Indian. I think I hit him in the spine, so he shouldn’t cause you much trouble.”

  In the old woman’s pockets I found a worn but well-honed K-Bar clasp knife; a packet of heavy steel needles and a coil of dried gut; a flint-and-steel fire starter; a set of brass earloops decorated with alternate black and red beads and each bearing a backwards swastika beaten out of what looked like low- grade gold but might have been brass. There was a packet of jerky in one pocket; I was about to taste a piece and find out what kind of meat it was—dragon, mandigger, aurochs, mastodon, maybe just plain deer—when I noticed that the old woman had bled on top of it. I threw the jerky into the Hassayampa; it floated for a few seconds, and then a huge fish swirled and took it. Judging by the scales in that minimal light, it was either a tarpon or a mahseer, though we were a little too far upstream for either. . . .

  Maybe a huge pike. My uncle told me a story once about the voracity of the pike on the Upper Hassayampa. He had been fishing with some of his Indian cronies in midsummer and with little success. They had taken a few “hatchet handles”—small pike, skinny and fanged, reeking of that mucilaginous slime that belies the good taste of the meat within. Heading downriver in his canoe one evening after fishing all day with the Indians, my uncle let the current carry him as he took his ease in the stern, a steering paddle under his armpit and a fat, fragrant Havana cigar in his teeth.

  “It was a lovely evening,” he told me, “with the sunset illuminating the canyon walls ahead of me and a breeze ghosting upriver against me. Mandiggers chuckled at me from the cliffs and the trees, and I could see fish rising in the riffles to suck down the evening moths. But I’d had enough fishing for the day, and I just wanted to savor the evening and my cigar. Puffing and steering, I was really enjoying myself; now and then I’d flick the cigar ash over the side and watch it dissolve as it broke up and rac
ed the canoe. Then, out of the comer of my eye, just as I flicked the cigar tip bright red in the last light of the day, I saw a gigantic maw rise through the water, angling up so fast from behind the canoe that before I could react it had broken the water with a mighty splash and bitten onto my cigar hand. Out of pure reflex I flipped it into the canoe. It was a pike—not just a hatchet handle or an ax handle, but a goddamned log of a pike, its teeth buried in my hand, thrashing and slapping its slime and its teeth all over the canoe, not to mention my lap. I damn near capsized getting that fish off of my hand—I still don’t know how I did it; but then I smashed the fight out of it with an empty beer bottle that was lying conveniently to hand.

  “That pike had risen to my cigar coal, must have seen it as a monster firefly or some strange fiery bird—they take birds on the wing, you know, low-flying swallows and nighthawks that work the river at dawn and dusk. He tore the hell out of my hand, and it was weeks before the infection cleared up, but he sure made the fishing trip for me. I have to admire that kind of voracity, that grand and insatiable appetite that brooks no hesitation. Pike have no problem with menus: they surge before choosing, or perhaps choice and consumption are the same act for them. It’s there; I eat. When you think of all the sad people who flip out over the choice between mustard and ketchup on their cheeseburgers, it seems a shame there isn’t more of the pike in us.

  . . . Staring down at the dead old woman, I considered our own voracity. We had killed her for a toy dump truck. Our voracity was sentimental, the curse of memory and foresight. I rolled the old lady into the Hassayampa, and as she spun slowly off into the main current her face remained down, her eyes focused now on the river bottom rather than the absent sun.

  “He doesn’t have my truck,” said the boy as I climbed back up the rocks. He had the Indian covered where he lay propped back against the sandstone cliff. My son had built a small fire of driftwood. Water was boiling in the teapot. “He says he remembers you from the Ratnose expedition. I don’t think he’s hit that bad—he moved his legs when he crawled back up against that rock.”

  The man’s eyes shone like rain puddles in the firelight, the rest of his face dark cement.

  “I’d offer you a drink,” I told him, “if some sneaking yellowbelly hadn’t stole all my gear.”

  “There’s most of a bottle in the pack on the pinto,” he said. I signaled my son to fetch the horses; we could hear them nickering only a few hundred yards upstream. He handed me the Luger, took the shotgun, and slid up over the rocks.

  “How are your legs?” I asked the Indian.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Numb, but the feeling is coming back. I think your bullet only nicked the small of my back. Not much blood, and I can feel an exit wound, so if there’s any lead in there, it’s only a little bit, a few pieces at most.”

  I dragged him by his bootheels closer to the fire and washed the wound with the hot tea water. He was right: it was a minor wound. The mouth of the wound was just at the top of his Mongol spot—a purplish, puckered rip just an inch away from the spinal column. The exit wound was only another inch away —larger, but a clean tear that had not taken much meat or muscle with it.

  “I couldn’t have stunned you better with a sandbag,” I told him. “When the kid gets back, I’ll pour on some sulfa and bandage you up.”

  “No sulfa,” he said, “and no bandages either.”

  “Why not? They were in my first-aid kit.”

  “I sold most of that stuff.”

  “The kid’s truck too?”

  “Yes, and the fishing rods, the lighter shotguns, the tent, and the tools. All I kept was the big shotgun, the ammo and the whiskey.”

  “Who did you sell it to?”

  “Ratanous.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll need the whiskey.”

  27

  THE BOY RETURNED with the horses, and while he rubbed them down and picketed them, I poured Johnny Black a drink, then one for myself. A wind with the taste of winter on it worked down along the backbone of the riverbank like a fillet knife, but we were beneath its edge, tucked into the rocks with our smoky driftwood fire that coughed and popped now and then—an old man rolling the black phlegm of his fatal illness around on his tongue, enjoying it, hawking up more, make the most of it. Johnny Black spoke of his wife, but there was no dignity in his rambling. Maria Elena. An over-the-hill hooker when he rescued her from one of Ratnose’s brothels on the border. Reduced by clap and toothlessness to a blow-job specialist. Before her teeth fell out, she starred in Ratnose’s geek show under the stage name of Erogenous Jones, a pun that Johnny Black felt was wasted on the loggers and trappers frequenting Ratnose’s establishment.

  “Do you know Pecker Point?” Johnny Black asked. “The red-light district across the river from Silenius where Crown-Zellerbach had that big cedar sawmill? They’ve closed it down now, but back when I met Maria Elena it was booming. They averaged six stompings and two knifings a night, more gougings and nose bitings than you could count. Every other guy seemed to have something missing—an ear or an eye, a few fingers, his nose; one guy even had his lower lip ripped off, in a fight with a fag Nigger piano player whose teeth were filed down cannibal style.

  “I tracked in there one spring with a load of furs—otter and caprizond from the Altyn Tagh, mainly—and the first thing I saw was that riffraff lynching the poor Nigger. They had him lashed to a freight-wagon wheel outside Ratnose’s cribs, bucknaked and bleeding into the mud, those sharp teeth flashing under those frightened eyes. His name was Butch Beckwourth, and he claimed to be the grandson of Jim Beckwourth, the runaway slave who was later a war chief up with the Absaroka. Nice fellow—or at least, he played the piano nicely—Butch. A bit of a pansy maybe, but in those days in that country, a man would punch anything, including dead otters; I ought to know. After you’ve been in the woods long enough, there’s a kind of sexual democracy develops that you’ll never find in the towns—maybe in the cities, but never in the towns.

  “And certainly not in any town that Ratnose had a stake in. That bastard hates to see anyone have fun, of any kind. In fact, he gets his own fun out of wrecking other folks’ fun. When he bought into the fuck business in Pecker Point, he changed the name of his whorehouse to The Pecker Wrecker,’ and he stocked it with the most clapped-up, syph-ridden, blue-balls- breeding collection of rotten ginch you’ve ever sniffed—Christ, you could get boils on your ass just walking through the door. They say he spiked his booze with his own drippings, but even if he did, it couldn’t have hurt the flavor. The only music they played in there was that stuff that wrecked your ears—Stravinsky, Pollack, Robbe-Grillet.

  “Butch Beckwourth played in the Pecker Wrecker, which made it all the worse what Ratnose did to him. Butch played country blues, and he sang it through those filed teeth of his so that you could hear the dentist’s saw on every nerve. He sang about bridges and crappers and thin possum gruel like only a file-tooth spade sissy could sing it—broke your heart after a winter in the woods.

  “When Ratnose took over the place, he made Butch play Debussy, just to wreck Butch’s style. He put Maria Elena into the geek show, as Erogenous Jones. Butch would be playing Debussy or Ravel or Carl Orff, sometimes The Rite of Spring, on a good weekend, and Maria Elena would appear on the stage leading a donkey. The donkey’s name was Herbie; he’d been the asshole buddy of a prospector named Herb Petrov. The donkey would hump Maria Elena for openers. Then Maria Elena would drag out a leather mail pouch and open it up on a card table. In it she had a bag of burnt-out flashbulbs, a cage of baby chickens, a loaf of bread, and a butcher’s knife. While Butch played that crazy music, she pranced around, dunking the flashbulbs in her cunt, then eating them as if they were artichoke hearts. Very elegant. Then she took the chicks, one by one, petted them and cooed over them, dancing all the while, and when they were clucking, cheeping, all worked up, she would bite off their heads, one by one, and suck them dry —guts and all; just a wrinkled yellow sack left. Finally, remember it’
s Debussy or Stravinsky and those wicked pointed teeth flickering over there at the piano, she would slice two pieces of bread, crap on them, and eat the sandwich. Ratnose’s idea.”

  The fire was dying, so I threw on some more driftwood. Johnny held out his cup for whiskey. I refilled both of our cups. My son sat back against the rocks, whittling a piece of driftwood into the shape of a rocket. I told him to take the crossbow and hunt up some breakfast in the swamp just a short distance downriver. Grudgingly, he went.

  “Where was I?” Johnny Black asked.

  “They were lynching Butch Beckwourth.”

  “Sure they were. He’d bitten off a logger’s lip. The logger was sitting there on the seat of the wagon, trying to glue the bitten- off chunk back onto the place where it belonged, but the blood was too slippery; he was whimpering there; it looked like he was trying to eat a piece of raw liver. Butch was lashed up against the wheel of the freight wagon. Ratnose was in charge. He had all of his girls out there, trying to give Butch a hard-on and not doing too well. They tweaked his balls and went down on him, they poked their fingers up his ass. But Butch was too scared to get it up.

  “Finally Ratnose brought in the two grungiest loggers in camp and promised them free tickets to the geek show if they’d jerk each other off in front of Butch. While they were flailing away, that purple hose of his started to get stiff—against his own will, you could see, from the way he gritted his pointy teeth. Finally, when it was up and straining, Ratnose chopped it off with a brush hook and stuffed it in Butch’s mouth. It was strange to see—Butch didn’t know whether to be happy or sad; he sniveled a bit with the blood running off of his chin, but his eyes were happy even while his teeth did their dirty work and his life drained away into the mud. He never resolved the problem, the poor son-of-a-bitch; he died with his eyes happy and his mouth sad.