“Goddammit, Runaway! Fucking and fighting don’t mix—not in my camp they don’t. They’re not the same thing!” Ratnose was standing over me, croaking madly and whistling his sjambok through the air—his cattle-driving quirt, made of raw rhinoceros hide; the kind of whip the South African Boers use for keeping their kaffirs in line. Ratnose enraged was something to see. His good eye bulged and sparkled in the firelight like an electric zircon, while the empty socket seemed to spit little bits of barbed wire. His lips were drawn back from his broken brown teeth; his grizzly goatee shot sparks of ire and sputum. Without his ratskin cap to hold it down, his stiff black hair stood up like the roach of a kingfisher, ragged and slightly mad, and his bent pointy dark beak only added to the likeness. A kingfisher ready to swoop and spear me, poor baby trout! Hold me helpless in his beak and then bat me against a tree limb until I stopped wriggling and he could gulp me down headfirst into his fishy-foul, primitive gut.
Indignant now and with tears in my eyes, as much from hurt feelings as the whip cut on my face, I was about to yell out, But it’s my truck, you filthy thief! Until I realized where that would lead. Ratnose thought I was just another hippie-dippie runaway, come to join his merry band. If he connected me with the truck, and thus with the loot that Johnny Black had sold him, he’d know I was from a party that had been ripped off on the upper river, a party plotting revenge. He’d probably send off a bunch of his killers to do in my dad. He’d certainly serve me up for tomorrow night’s supper. So I kept my mouth shut and just stared back at him, in neutral.
“Okay,” he said finally, his kingfisher’s roach relaxing. “It was probably just the crait. But goddammit, kid, you shouldn’t beat up on girls.”
Girls? I turned and looked at my little punching bag, and sure enough it was a girl. A woman, actually. I hadn’t noticed the tits, small but definitely there, when I was flailing away at her head. She had the typical Upper Hassayampan features: wide cheekbones; a straight, thin nose; almond eyes; the mouth wide and thin-lipped, rather slack but smiling shyly at me now; and all of it framed in a coarse, lank mop of shiny black hair. Like most of Ratnose’s people, she was dressed in a loose shirt of smoked leather, which she wore over a thick vest of quilted cotton that helped disguise her superstructure, frail as it was. She wore the high Mountain Wyandot moccasins with a pair of worn wool pants tucked in, and around her waist was a heavy, brass-studded belt that carried a knife, a set of pliers, and a gut bag of junk like needles, thread, a waterproof match safe, an awl, a lid of grass, and suchlike staples. She also wore a headband of very fine hide that was marked in black with intricate geometric designs—a strip of human skin, I later learned, from the thigh of a tattooed Iban warrior whom the gang had rubbed out the previous winter during a foray down South. She also had a wolf’s tooth dangling from a piece of 20-pound-test monofilament. She kept the fang warm between her tits and used it to clean her ears.
Her name was Twigan, which I learned when Ratnose invited us over to his fire to eat. He had calmed down now and was playing the genial host.
“You two should make up,” he said, leading the way through the still-active bodies toward his bearskin. “The Runaway here will probably stay with us. I need him to replace Chipper. Poor old Chipper. A big bull knelt on him and then bit his nose off— blood and snot all over the snow. That wasn’t so bad—we probably could have saved him—but one of his broken ribs went through his lungs and he was dead before we had the bull gutted. Tell me, Runaway my boy, what do you make of our little Twigan here? Cuddly little number, isn’t she?” He patted Twigan’s round little butt, and she smiled happily up at him. She still had my cuddly little truck in her cute little paws, so I only muttered something polite.
We dined on a dish that Ratnose called “shag-worp,” or words to that effect. It was his favorite dish, he said: a rarity—something he had learned from the Chinese during his days of banditry on the lower river. “Like everything in the Chinese kitchen,” he said, “it has philosophical meaning as well as the culinary.” One of Ratnose’s women served it up hot from a sizzling wok, along with small cups of hot rice liquor and steaming bean sprouts. It was a thin, crisp cutlet: white meat, smooth and sweet with just a tang—the merest taste—of something wild and willful. Ratnose took a bite, made a slight face (his long nose wrinkling like a mildly irate rodent’s), and then splashed a dash of soy sauce on his portion.
“Not the very best,” he said apologetically. “How do you like it, Runaway?”
“Fine,” I mumbled through a mouthful. Then, swallowing: “What is it?”
“I don’t usually give away recipes,” Ratnose said, smiling playfully, “but in this case I’ll make an exception. To understand shag-worp—indeed, to appreciate it—you must first understand and appreciate the interplay of life and death, that interplay catalyzed by hunger, lust, desire, demand, competition, call it what you will. You must understand that death is only the acting out of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: i.e., energy in a high state tends to become energy in a lower state, all the way down to the inert. Contrariwise—would you like another sip of rice wine? A mug of crait? No?—all right, contrariwise, life is a battle against the inevitable downstream flow of the Second Law. Living creatures take other living creatures in their jaws and consume their high-state energy, thus delaying the tendency, the inevitable tendency, toward inertia on their own part. If the living creature can forestall inertia long enough to reproduce itself, then the Second Law is violated. Not of course for the individual, who dies eventually anyway, but for those countless outlaws who are struggling upstream against the flow of the Second Law, and their offspring, etcetera. Get it? Like salmon, right? Were all outlaws against nature—anything that procreates: wolves, lambs, salmon, spearmen, minnows, kingfishers, serfs, kings, crooks, cops, flies, falcons, fuck-offs, all of us—outlaws!”
“Fine,” I said, “but how do you make shag-worp?”
“First off,” Ratnose said, “you kill something—a dog, maybe, or a man if you have to. You let the corpse lie out in the weather, on the earth, until it’s infested with maggots. You wait until the grubs are squirming around the eyes, the nostrils, the lips, the ass hole. Then you put the infested meat into a container. A twenty-gallon gas can will do for a dog, anyway, or a small child. The maggots, hungry on their upstream journey against the Second Law, consume the corpse in its entirety. Then, hungry still, they turn on one another. The strong consume the weak, until finally there is only one maggot left. A giant maggot that fills the entire container.
“At that point”—and Ratnose leaned forward, gesturing with his knife—”you dig up the can, pull out the maggot, slice it neatly, and fry it in vegetable oil. You serve it up with bean sprouts and rice wine.” He leaned back to see how I would take it. Thanks to the crait, I kept it down.
“The only tricky part is making sure the gas can is clean,” Ratnose added finally. “That and knowing when to dig it up, but you learn that with time.” He looked at me expectantly, as if he wanted some comment or question.
“It tastes pretty good,” I said at last. “That’s a neat idea about all the outlaws swimming upstream against death. Where did you pick that up?”
“I didn’t pick it up.’ I figured it out. Don’t let the way I look or act deceive you. I’m not a dummy. I read a lot. I have all kinds of books up in my cave—not just books I’ve taken in raids, but books I brought with me when I first came up here: physics and chemistry texts, law books, the works of Heidegger and Buber and Sartre, of Conrad and Proust and Joyce, poetry from Donne to Dickey, Sufistic texts in the Arabic . . . I look this way because of the life I lead, that I’ve chosen to lead, and that kind of a life leaves scars on a man. It makes him act, finally, the way he looks. To paraphrase Sartre, a man is the sum of his scars —don’t you think?”
By that time, I didn’t think anything. I couldn’t think anything. I was stunned to the eyeballs on crait and fried maggot and an overload of impressions. Besides, I had to take a lea
k, so I excused myself and wandered down to the river. Walking, I felt wide and light, as if each atom of my body was separated from the next by an inch of clear, cold darkness. The music splashed against the atoms of my body like surf against a string pier, surging through and around them, creating momentary whirlpools of sound and light and then receding again to let the darkness take over. Looking back at the campfires, wincing at the pain of the light, I realized that Fric and Frac were no longer serenading us. The music came from somewhere else, or perhaps from my head, from my very molecules. I found that I could orchestrate it however I wished, so as I tripped along through the darkness I experimented with various time signatures—three-four, four-four, five-four, eleven-eight. My heart was the obvious timpani, my liver a clarinet, my lungs an oboe, my toes a slow guitar, my nose—a nose flute, of course. And when I unzipped to pee in the river, my bladder issued forth the entire Vienna Boys Choir, all rills and trills and chirrups.
Void now, I sat back against a deadfall and listened to the music as I studied the sky. The rain clouds of the day had blown through. Bats hunted against the stars, flying their intricate, random zigzag routes. No way you could diagram that in a playbook, not even with a computer. The only way the random manuevers of bat and bug made sense was as a death dance. Or a life dance, as Ratnose would think of it, taking the predator’s point of view. I thought about that for a while: all life as outlawry. It excited me. My mind started leaping ahead with the idea to a great clash of cymbals (I was belching the essence of fried maggot by now): Ratnose’s Law of the Outlaw put the skids to everything my parents and teachers were trying to lay on me. An orderly universe. The higher forms of life as the logical rulers of that universe. The highest ruling form, mankind- ruled itself by wise, benign, and thoughtful predators who justly took advantage of the low-lifes beneath them, whether cow or cowherd (or coward?), though not so crudely or cruelly as to incite rebellion . . .
A bat swooped low to suck in a moth that was milling with its pals just inches above the water. At the same moment, a huge pikelike fish vaulted off the bottom, broke water with a roar of fins and gill plates, and gulped down the bat. I could see the broken wing tips of the tiny, warm mammal protruding from the jaws of the fish as it plunged back into the stream. Then a dark streak as the fish turned, like a log bending back on itself, to take position once again in ambush for another bat . . .
The way Ratnose saw the world, everything in it was hungry. Everything bit and ate to the best of its ability. If it wasn’t bitten and eaten itself before it could reproduce, all the better. There were no superior or inferior forms of life, except in the sense that some individuals let themselves be put down—went weakly and meekly to the chopping block. That was what man’s law was all about: a con job aimed at making people lie down and take it, accept the bloodless life of rules and restrictions, their tongues coated with the sour fuzz of guilt, their bellies griping with anxiety over whether they were dressed properly, talked properly, carried the proper piece of paper with the proper signature to permit them to do the proper thing. Rat- nose said to hell with all of that. He ate his meat fried, all right, and spiced with gunpowder.
I puked up the fried maggot, watched its greasy swirl drift out of sight down the dark water, and then walked back toward the campfires. The music had died. My body was back to its normal size, rather small but very dense, the molecules rubbing happily against each other as if to say, Hi, buddy, long time no feel. The scene around the campfire looked like those photographs you see of places like Wounded Knee or Auschwitz or My Lai. Limp bodies sprawled all around, most of them half in and half out of their clothes. Tits lolling this way, tongues that way, limp peckers drooping towards the earth like night crawlers that hadn’t quite made it all the way home. The fires had burned down to beds of red coals, dusted over with that grainy gray ash that flakes from time to time like lava cooling. Dead silence except for the snores and a few throaty moans. The crait caldron had cooled as well, and now its surface was a thick, slack green skin, pimpled in places by iridescent bubbles.
Off in the darkness, I heard a livelier sound, the steady slipslop of people fucking. I moved in for a closer look. It was Ratnose, up on his knees, a dense and beaky blackness against the thinner dark of the night, pumping away in dog fashion against a pale ass that glowed in the dying firelight like an opal. Ratnose was enjoying every millimeter of it, the old push-you—pull-me in slow motion, with half-twists thrown in there now and then as if he were pulling the cork of a wine bottle. His lone eye rolled at the stars like a searchlight. His balls slapped against the girls thighs with a sweaty, sodden thwacking sound, like bell clappers that had been turned to raw clay. When he came, only his pecker moved; his face stayed still. The girl disimpaled herself and rolled over on her back. Of course it was Twigan. Ratnose leaned over to kiss her and then turned towards me.
“You better get some sleep, Runaway,” he said. “In the morning, we have to see how good you can shoot and ride. And it better be damned good—otherwise, into the stew pot.” He uttered what seemed to be a laugh with his hoarse, kingfisher croak, and I heard Twigan laughing with him.
32
HUNK SHOOK ME AWAKE at first light. The cave was dark and warm, smelling of mushrooms. A heavy frost had laid strange figures on the oilskin window, and while Hunk fried up some thick slabs of aurochs heart and onions for our breakfast, I walked outside to see the day break. Fragments of a nightmare blew through my skull, a broken cobweb in the wind, leaving me weak and on the edge of tears. A giant bat with Ratnose’s face had carried me above the Hassayampa, then dropped me. “Learn to fly!” My wings could barely hold the air. I slid down the sky with that helpless, gut-knotted feeling that comes with an uncontrollable skid on ice, cupping my wings and kicking my feet, falling, falling straight for the river, where a dark shape waited underwater, a dark shape that resolved itself finally at the last panic-jerking moment into a water dragon . . .
It was clear and cold that morning, with the underbrush coated in hoarfrost, so I trotted a bit to kick off the shakes. My run took me past the storage sheds near the corral, and while I stood there huffing and puffing the horsy-sweet air, I saw a motorcycle parked in the back of one of the sheds. I choked up a bit, flashing on my lovely little Honda SL-100 trail bike waiting for me back home, all blue and lonely and shiny and ready to race. This bike, on closer inspection, proved to be a Husqvarna 450—a bit bent and dirty, but seemingly in running condition. I rocked the bike on its stand and heard gasoline sloshing in the tank. For a moment I felt a surge of elation. I could escape from here right now if I wanted to: everyone was still asleep or else shaking with hangover from last night’s orgy; I could kick this Husky to life and pop a wheelie through those dead fires and with my elbows out in the most impeccable motocross style I’d fishtail down through the camp, farting a contemptuous farewell to Ratnose on the way, bounce down that horse trail in fifth, vaulting the ditches and drifting through the corners, and when I reached the Hassayampa I’d take my dad on the pillion and we’d split for home . . .
But the key wasn’t in the ignition.
“I’ve got it,” said Ratnose with a smirk. He walked into the shed and kicked a tire. “You know how to ride this thing?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve never ridden one with quite this much power, but I’ve got my own bike back home, a dirt bike, and I’ve raced it a bit.”
“We killed the guy who had this one,” Ratnose said with an air of detached nostalgia. “He was coming down the valley over there to the west, must have been doing about sixty miles an hour. He was a good quarter of a mile away from us. Hunk just couldn’t resist the challenge—a fast-moving target at that kind of range. Old Hunky just took a rest on a convenient boulder and swung that little two-forty-three of his, and crack! Broke the guy’s neck on the first shot. The motorcycle went about two hundred yards farther than the guy. That’s how it got all scuffed up like that. I tried to ride it, but the bastard threw me. We wheeled it back here
, though, just in case we could trade it sometime.”
“I’ll take it off your hands,” I said. Ratnose smirked again.
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “After all, we may be taking you off our hands before the day is out.” He licked his fingers as if they were covered with gravy. “You’d better get your breakfast, because I want to start the test right quick now.”
After I’d eaten—if you can call it that; I wasn’t exactly ravenous—I took the shotgun and a bandolier filled with various loads and walked out with Hunk to where Ratnose and the others were waiting. It was warmer now, and the frost was flaking from the trees. Hunk was slab-faced and solemn. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder—a pretty little .243 Browning lever- action with a four-power Weaver scope. Fric and Frac were lying on the hillside, playing grab-ass and yukking it up, now and then taking a squirt from a wineskin. A noseless old man in horsehides, whose name was Beppo and who was reputed to be an excellent trapper, stood next to Ratnose with a pair of skulls in his hands. Some of the women were dragging in wood for a fire. Twigan was among them, and she threw me a friendly smile—the only one I’d seen so far today.
“All right,” said Ratnose cheerfully, “before we see how well you can shoot, we want to see how well you can take being shot at. Give him those skulls, Beppo. Now, Runaway, you hike on out there towards the woods about a hundred paces and put those skulls on your shoulders, one on a side, and face us. Hunk here will get rid of them for you, won’t you, Hunky?” My roommate nodded gloomily.
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