Blood Sport

by Robert F. Jones

  Okay, turbulence is the nature of spring, however you call it. I balled Twigan turbulently all that night, out there in the cold black humming muck of the Hassayampa. We set that goo to bubbling, she and I. Hot it was, steam rising off of the bike where it stood there in the webbed starlight, steam rising from Twigan’s twot and belly button. My prick was a steam shovel, and at one point I retrieved a rock the size of a hen’s egg from her cunt, where I’d shoved it as the result of too much root-hogging ardor. I never listened to her little whimpers of love and instruction, and she hardly heard my yelps of excitement. It was straight, plain fucking, with none of the refinements of thought that we later learned to suffer. The river was grumbling off there in the dark, and the hair on the back of my head stood stiff as my cock. I was fearless, yet I knew there was much to fear, and all the while the bike stood creaking and steaming beside us.

  I got her up, finally, dog style, my hands all muddy on her waist. Her waist felt like a bundle of electric cable covered with glue and then again with silk. She looked back at me over her shoulder, under her coarse, hayrick hair, fearful, and I looked down at her bald ass hole and the gash beneath it. My eyes were an owl’s eyes: I could see the cunt hairs twitching their calligraphy along the ridges of her slot. Whatever moon there was, and it wasn’t much, glinted on the head of my cock. I stuffed it in there, into the slot already slippery with the madness of the night, that fishy steam bath. All the way up, my muddy hand spread on her narrow back, my balls slapping against her narrow thighs, her ass hole winking sideways at me, the long pale tube of my meat—my own meat! I remember chanting—slipping in and out of there, the bike chortling its metallic dance tune somewhere to the outside of my roaring eardrums; I tilted my head to the steamy sky that was already fogging my eyebrows and barked like a dog—I was Ratnose!

  Much more than that, I know. Her little tits under my fingers, the nipples as long and tender as new peony shoots. Warm belly, cooled by the air, leading to the wiry nest of her box, electric. All of that, along with her smiles and her assurances that, believe me, kept me sane until the morning. How could we make love, be in love, without Ratnose approving of it? How could this passion arouse indignation? Ire? Murder? Yet I had ominous thoughts that night, slipping through the steam at the edge of my consciousness—thoughts of head cheese in which the gristle of my ears, of my very own nose would provide the gelatin that others might favor. I could see Ratty ladling my ear bones out of the pot. I could see him picking his teeth with one of them. But then I would put my hand on Twigan’s cunt, feel the juices cooling there over the volcano, and take courage from the geology of our love. “Oh, Runner,” she said, toward dawn, “you in deep shit.”

  She was right. When we got back into camp that morning, with the cook fires smoking low and the smell of bacon fat already rancid in the nooning air, the whole tribe was awake. We grumbled in through the mud, watched by graybeards and babies, not a one of them with a smile for us. No sign of Ratty. His cave was shut tight, his shades drawn. Judging by the glum faces and tugged moustaches of the onlookers, everyone seemed to know that Twigan and I had cheated on Ratnose. Though how those immoral savages could judge us I sure didn’t know. But even the bike seemed to agree. No sooner did we enter the compound than the Husky started hawking: out of gas. There was one more can in the shed, I knew, but I’d have to get more if I was going to retain my status with these people, and more importantly, with Twigan.

  She scampered off to the girls’ tent as soon as I parked. Cussing a blue streak, I wheeled the bike into the shed and grabbed the last gas can, one of the two that had been lashed to the side of the bike when Ratnose liberated it. The can had been full when I hefted it a few days earlier, but now it felt ominously light. I opened it and sloshed. Barely enough to get me back to the Hassayampa, if I rode light-handed all the way.

  “We use petrol this morning to make our fires burn good,” Hunk told me later. “That fog, it make the wood very damp.” He kicked a tire and giggled. “Ratnose, he insist.”

  36

  I WASN’T WORTH MUCH on the meat run that day. We slid down the river through fog and murmur, surprising a cow rhino and her calf, both of them belly-deep in the muck, their woolly locks clotted like tar, but I failed to kill either of them. I was shooting the late Chipper’s .30-06 Mannlicher, and I took the cow through the shoulder hump—I could see the hair fly, along with a slab of raw, red hide—but the bullet only sped her on her way. She surged out of the gumbo like a long, black champagne cork, and her infant tripped lightly after her, my second shot splattering mud all over the baby’s butt. When I worked the bolt for a third shot, it jammed.

  “You must be fucked out,” Fric said wonderingly.

  “Naw,” said Frac, “he just ain’t woke up yet. Old Runner, he shoot good once he got the sleepy boogers out of his eyes.”

  I blew four more shots that morning—two on deer; one on an aged, lung-blown aurochs cow who reared back at the slap of my bullet a foot from her nose and spewed saliva to the treetops as she wheeled and fled. The last shot was at a bush pig, standing in profile beside a gnarled old beech tree teetering on the riverbank. The pig rooted contentedly in the beech mast, grunting a swinish little song to itself. Fric slowed the canoe, and Frac eased up to a stop alongside a waterlogged stump. I took a deep breath and shivered. It was an easy shot of no more than a hundred yards, with the river quiet in this backwater, gurgling assurance to me, it seemed, with the rifle barrel braced perfectly steady on the trunk of the tree—and when I squeezed off, I saw the bullet kick dirt well beyond the pig’s shoulder. It looked up stupidly, stared for a long moment at the place where the dirt had jumped, and then went back to its song. I slipped another round into the chamber and took my rest again. I held the top of the leaf well down into the groove of the buckhorn; I took another deep breath and concentrated on bringing my pulse down to zero; I squeezed ever so gently as my eye burned a hopeful hole through the pigs shaggy, softly breathing hide, just back of the shoulder, but when the rifle went off—with that ever-surprising whop that a well-shot rifle utters—by Christ if the bullet didn’t once again hit far over and beyond the target. This time the pig got the message. It humped into the brush before I could reload.

  “Shit!” I said.

  Fric and Frac said nothing, but exchanged meaningful glances. When we stopped for lunch, down near the bottom of the big bend, Fric allowed as how I was probably getting uptight as a result of no sleep and a series of misses with the rifle. Frac allowed as what I missed had nothing to do with firearms. I sulked. By this time, I had gotten to know them pretty well. Fries real name was George P. Holmes, Jr., and he had grown up in Cincinnati, the son of a prominent hardware-store owner. Fracs real name was Edward Frattolini, out of Neenah, Wisconsin, father a fireman. They were both dropouts, and had met on a commune near Taos, New Mexico, where the living proved way too easy. They were ex-hippies, well versed in guitar playing and dope smoking, and they liked to argue about which one had had the clap more often. Frac always won, because he still had it. But Fric maintained that since he had also caught both the syph and the blue-balls, that put him ahead on degree-of-difficulty. Apart from screwing, rock climbing, skinny-dipping, dope smoking, dope dropping, dope shooting, and playing endless games of softball, the communards were into electronics in a big way. Their patron, a wealthy woman from Albuquerque whom they called Grass Widow, owned a big electronics-supply company and gave them everything they wanted, from tiny transistors to a huge Moog synthesizer. When the commune finally collapsed out of boredom and the two ex-hippies took off in search of Ratnose, Frac brought with him a bag full of electronic parts. Now, during the winter, and at odd moments when the spirit moved him, he was building an Electronic Gun Dog. It had four stiff, clanking, robotlike legs, a heat-sensitive nose that you could tune to the body temperature of whatever game animal you wanted it to hunt, and instead of eyes, two 12-gauge shotgun barrels. To load it, you cocked the tail and shoved the ammo up the Gun Dog’s ass
.

  “What we need today is your goddam Gun Dog,” I said glumly as we munched our fried-maggot sandwiches.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” Frac said, shaking his head. “He’s crapped out right now. I need four D-type batteries to get him going again, and we’re fresh out of them.”

  “Maybe they have some in Hymarind,” Fric said. “In the old Chinese market down there near the calaboose? I mean, they’ve got transistor radios and sewing machines and shit like that; why not batteries?”

  “Do they have gasoline in Hymarind?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Fric, “out by the ammo dump where the Burma Road used to go through. Or at least, they used to have gas there. That crazy doctor who came to town last year was using it for his generator in the hospital he built before the witchman poisoned him. Maybe the doc burned it all up.”

  “I need gas for the Husky,” I said. “Maybe we ought to go into Hymarind and get us some batteries and some gas.”

  Agreed. We gave up hunting for the afternoon and bounced back to camp full tilt down the river. The idea of going to town had infected us, had turned out heads around so that we took the most dangerous chances that the river afforded. We bounced on the haystacks and roweled the white horses with our paddles so that it sometimes seemed the canoe was airborne, with only our blades touching the frothy water. And sure enough, as it so often happens when you’re riding a wave of supreme confidence, luck looked after us. Not a hundred yards from the landing, we spotted a great cave bear digging in the bankside muskrat dens. He reared up on his haunches to get a better look at us, and swinging Chipper’s rifle to my shoulder, I snap-shot and nailed him square between the eyes. Iron sights, from a canoe moving on white water, standing on my knees at a range of more than 200 yards, the best shot of my life. The bullet must have been fired from my eye, just like Frac’s Gun Dog.

  We left the bear for the women to butcher and ran up to camp. Ratnose’s cave was still buttoned tight. I grabbed my saddlebags and threw in a bundle of jerky and a big bag of rice, along with a tea tin of crait makings and my old mess kit. Blondie was still sulking in the back of the tepee, so I pretended she wasn’t there. I slung a bandolier of .30-06 rounds over my shoulder, threw a blanket over the other, and went out to rope me a horse. Twigan was standing by the corral, looking shy and hesitant.

  “Listen,” I said to her, “I killed a big bear just above the landing, on the other side of the river. You skin it out and tan the hide for us. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “Where you going, Runner?”

  “Hymarind. We need gas for the Husky, so we can do some more riding like last night. Right?”

  “Right,” she said, and smiled. She grabbed her cunt and squeezed it, squinching her eyes together in a quick little mockery of anticipated sexuality. I didn’t need any of that right now—not with Ratty probably looking down at us from his cave and plotting some wicked revenge. I told her to cut that shit out and went in to rope my horse.

  37

  IT TOOK US the rest of that day and the better part of the next to get to Hymarind, riding hard all the way and stopping only for a dinner of rice jerky and a breakfast of the same. But we were too eager for either fatigue or the dullness of the menu to blunt our fine edge. The crait helped some, too. When we finally reached the crest of the last ridge above Hymarind, our tails were dragging, so we stood there in the waning light, letting the horses catch their wind. The town lay like the hub of a broken wheel down there below us, with the four dusty, bent caravan routes leading into it like spokes and the late-afternoon sun gleaming on the corrugated-iron roofs at the center. A streamer of black smoke wiggled from the mouth of the smokestack that marked the site of the puffin factory. The smokestack was strictly ornamental, since the old women who worked in the puffin factory stitched their toy puffins by hand out of dragon- hide remnants and stuffed them with rice chaff before painting the ugly little birds with nail polish and boot blacking, imported at great cost from nearby Tor. Chang, the factory foreman, insisted on a smokestack, though, because he had seen pictures of the Industrial Revolution and felt that smokestacks were part of it. “Ah, Sighed Frac, “home sweet Hymarind!”

  The girls in the Costive Cowpoke Cocktail lounge were glad to see us. Not a single caravan had arrived yet that spring from the south, and the girls had spent the winter drinking tea, making those big bright Hymarind hooked rugs, and balling one another with the giant purple dildo that Hal McVeigh, the Costive Cowpoke himself, kept hanging on the wall behind the bar next to his framed dollar bill and the photograph, faded now, of Hal and his buddies in steel helmets and fatigues, posed beside their deuce-and-a-half truck back during the war.

  “How’s your bowels, Hal?” Fric asked. The Costive Cowpoke allowed as how they were tight enough.

  “The winter was a real pisser down here,” Hal said as he poured us our drinks. “Mean winds off the mountains and dust storms out of the desert, and the temperature never above zero. But no snow, thank Christ, or at least, none that stuck—it was all blown away before it could freeze. These damned chippies—every time the wind would get to howling, they’d come running into my room, whimpering like they do, and jump into bed with me. Six of the dizzy cunts, all grabbing at my dick and begging for help. How was it up at Ratty’s camp?”

  Quiet, we told him. But it sure wasn’t quiet in there. The girls were getting stoned on company. They put on party hats and sang Christmas carols and snipped paper dolls out of the bar napkins. Gisela, the old redheaded circus whore who had come here all the way from Reeperbahn in Hamburg, snagged three pig’s feet out of the jar behind the jukebox and started juggling them. (It was this Gisela, incidentally, who had nipped off old Beppo’s nose—not with a shears, but with her teeth. “From little on,” she told me, “I always had the urge to bite off the end of someone’s nose.” Meiko, my favorite, a cuddly little number from Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku, played the comb and tissue paper for a while and then grabbed Fric by the groin, leading him upstairs with a coy smile. That was the signal for a mass orgy. Hal tried to whip them off with the dildo, but they were too strong for him, and too many. They dragged us up to the cribs like so many puffin dolls, and for an hour or so it was impossible to distinguish one body from another. It was all cockapuss and nipplebeard, slippery, hot, yelping, tangled, and confusing. At one point I could swear I saw Frac fucking Fric in the armpit. Then it all slowed down and sorted us out again into our original bodies.

  “There was a gringo in here a couple of weeks ago asking about you,” McVeigh told me. He had his chin on Meiko’s pud and was twanging her nipples absentmindedly while he stared at me with his red, watery blue eyes.

  “What did he look like?”

  “A mean fucker. Big, with a droopy moustache.”

  “What do you mean, mean ?”

  “Well, when little Carol tried to put the make on him, he pinched her tit and slapped her up against the wall. I came over the bar with the blackjack, but he pulled a gun on me.”

  “What was it?—the gun, I mean.”

  “I don’t know: a Walther, maybe, or maybe a Luger. Or maybe one of those cheap Jap copies—no offense, Meiko.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing—or anyway, nothing about you or Ratnose. I told him Ratnose was a myth, a legend, like Pecos Bill or the Old Man of the Mountain. I told him I’d never seen any kid that looked like you. But I don’t think he believed me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because these dumb broads kept giggling every time I denied there was a Ratnose. Finally the guy went away. He bought a couple bottles of bourbon off me and paid me in dragon’s- tooth meth: good stuff, very fresh.”

  We paid for our drinks and entertainment with a couple of sable hides that Fric had brought along and then wandered down to the old Chinese market. A full moon was just rising, dirty orange behind the dust blowing in from the desert. Dogs and cripples whined at us from the doorways. The unemployment picture
in Hymarind hadn’t improved much since my last visit in the fall, and we saw a few humps of rags flapping in the shadows that had to be dead men.

  So my father was looking for me. Maybe he’d given up and gone back down the river. I was pleased to think that he’d come this far, but uncertain about whether or not I hoped he was still on my trail. I’d gotten into Ratnose’s camp on my own power, and I wanted to get out that way too, if I ever had to get out. Or at least using the Husky’s power. That was my ace in the hole, that bike.

  There was no gas in the Chinese market, though the old Chink did indeed have some D-type batteries for Frac’s Gun Dog. He also had some beautiful dried seaweed—overpriced as usual, but I bought a bundle of it anyway as a present for Twigan. She loved seaweed in her crait, or even in her soup, for that matter. The old Chink didn’t know if there was any gasoline out at the dump. He pulled at his moustache and avoided our eyes.

  “Whatsa mattah you?” I asked him.

  “Dumpee velly bad place,” he said finally, when I stuck the muzzle of Chipper’s Mannlicher under his goaty little chin. “Clazy mans out there, killum dead pinis byumbye. Killum plenty Chinaman last week.”

  “He’s on the pipe,” said Frac. “Either that or he’s been selling stuff from the dump and don’t want us clipping any of it for ourselves.”