RATNOSE: It’s not what I teach. It’s not going to be so nice up at the Suck Hole.
TILKUT ponders that for a moment, fiddles with the dubbing needle. He gets up and walks to the window. He spreads his arms, stretches. Ratnose watches the big, wide back. He had never realized before how big Tilkut was. Tilkut’s face is small, pinched in with his many confusions, but his back is gigantic, wide and flat as a barn door. Tilkut stretches for a long time, his joints creaking and his mouth uttering high-pitched squeaks and groans. Then he reaches for a hunting knife on the windowsill—a smooth, swift reach that precludes interception—and whirling, he slams the knife, point first, into a beam across the room. The knife thunks and hums, its point buried two inches deep in cured white oak.
TILKUT: Oh, it’ll be nice up at the Suck Hole, all right. It’ll be nice for me. I could have killed you just then, like I could have killed you anytime I wanted in the past few hours. And you know it. I could have finished you and eased on out of here without anyone knowing. But I’m going to kill you up on the mountain, where my son can see me do it, and then I’m going to take him out of here and bring him back home. He’ll go back to school and learn his sums and his takeaways. He’ll learn to wear a coat and a tie again. He’ll get a job, finally, and a wife, and a secondhand car, and a house. Maybe he’ll get fat and bored and drunk like so many of us down at the end of the river, but at least hell have a chance to grow. And a chance to play while he’s growing; he’ll play at power and at love—subtle games, full of machinations, maybe, but the kind of play that can turn him into something more complex than a mere killer and fucker. Your way of life, with its orgies of blood and sex, seems free at first glance—captivating, even—but it produces simple machines. That’s why I’m going to kill you and bring my son out of it.
RATNOSE: I don’t kill that easy. I don’t have to die. For anyone.
TILKUT: We’ll see. We’ll see as soon as the kid gets back.
46
IT WAS LIKE back home, Runner thought, when they used to tap the maple trees. There were eight big sugar maples across the stream, behind the house, and when the snows of February had turned crusty—rotten, really, because the seasons die their deaths too—he and his father and his sister would take the sap buckets and the galvanized iron spigots and a hammer and the big, red-knobbed auger and walk down through the rotting snow across the rotting oaken bridge to the sugar bush. His father would crank the auger, watching first the gray elephant- hide bark turn out along the bright steel bit and then the fresh, wet, white, tender wood, boring deep into the tree’s veins. Then Runner would tap the spigots home, tink-tink-tink, and his sister would hang the buckets.
At each tree they waited, until the sap began to run, drip, drip, drip, into the buckets—cloudy at the beginning with chewed wood and then finally clear, cold, with only a hint of the syrup and sugar to come. Then each day after school, he and his sister would run galumphing in their overshoes down to the sugar bush and pour the sap into a big pail, and between them lug it up, sloshing and unwieldy, with a mind of its own like that of all liquids whether contained in cups or oceans, into the kitchen, where their mother would boil it down to syrup. The redwing blackbirds would have returned by then, grating their metal cries through the willows that flanked the stream. A few early trout hung in the murky boils under the bridge. Coming in from the raw, sour smell of spring, breathing the cured, sweet steam of new maple syrup, Runner and his sister felt very snug. The prospect of Mom’s pancakes hung rich in the house. It promised a happy future.
But this was a poison tree, promising only death. Runner and Twigan lay on a bed of hides and swamp grass near the ketwai tree. The Hassayampa groaned at their backs, fat and uncomfortable with the spring runoff, clearing its throat from time to time of the logs and skulls that were its seasonal burden. Runner wondered what his sister was doing right now. This had always been the best time of the year between them, when the testy side of nature came clear. The squirrels chasing each other through the trees, some to fuck and some to fight, or both. Even the birds went weird in the springtime, the female downy woodpeckers chasing the other females from the suet feeder while the males, with their red-dotted skullcaps, chased after the fight. Back then, before he had learned about sex, Runner enjoyed chasing his sister through the mud, or being chased by her, mocking and in a way emulating, envying, the birds and the squirrels.
His hand lay on Twigan’s naked belly, relaxed, just above the wisp of her skimpy bush. He wondered if his sister had gotten into fucking yet. She was older than he was, so probably she had. His hand on Twigan’s belly got a little nervous at the thought: Am I now or have I ever been unconsciously incestuous? The sap from the ketwai tree dripped slowly but noisily into the tin bucket which he had hung beneath a hand-carved willow-wood spigot. Already he had filled two canteens with the sap, and this bucket would complete a third. That was all Ratnose had said he needed, so by tomorrow morning they could head back to camp. Actually, they could leave tonight if they wanted—the moon would be full, and the sky promised clarity. But Runner was not all that sure he wanted to return. He dreaded the duel: not out of any sense of squeamishness—no, blood didn’t bother him anymore—but because he could not decide which man he wanted to win. More than that, he realized now, watching the sap drip: he could not decide which man he wished to become.
If Ratnose won, Runner would stay with the band—remain forever on the Hassayampa, hunting and killing and balling and scrambling his brains, never seeing his old pals again or his books or his softball mitt or his model rocket collection. Or his mother and sister, either. He would never again have the chance to lie around eating fudge and watching a monster movie on the late show, while a sleet storm howled outside. No jetliners, no museums, no ball games, no chance to win a trophy for motorcycle racing. No choice, really. In Ratnose’s world, you were plain and simply a man. He could feel the simplicity most sharply in his imagination. A man worked, screwed, and fixed things. Nothing more. Even the stories that Ratty’s people told were all the same, after you got through the first excitement of blood and transformation. Sure, the crait helped some, by making the rocks and the trees and the river and the animals seem somehow deeper than they were, but finally they all ended up being Stone Age people, Ratnose’s people, simple. Okay, Runner thought, recalling a line from a song his sister loved, ‘tis a gift to be simple. But for how long?
On the other hand, if his father won, Runner would leave the Hassayampa. No more wolf howling with Twigan; no more Hunk; never again the mad, screaming scrambles after wild cattle, with the raw, red heart meat hot and smoking in the winter mornings. No more orgies denying the night, crazy couplings, bombed out of his gourd so that the sun when it finally rose seemed to sing a prayer in a wondrous, loving language. No more leather against his skin, strange heads, the eyes glazing slowly into death, into rot. Only plastic clothes, tame meat, reconstituted orange juice. School buses and homework, the deadening discipline that promised “freedom” at the end. Partial pruderies. His guns would be locked in a gun cabinet, and he could not turn them on another man without the threat of legal action. He would not be allowed to race his bike without the muffler—things like that. What, after all, was the choice they promised you? The freedom to accept restrictions? Not much more. Oh, the freedom to make a pile of money and own the niftiest toys—sure, I’d love a brace of matched Purdeys, a Ferrari 365 GTB-4, a Land-Rover, an MV Agusta 500, Payne rods and Hardy reels galore, a cellarful of vintage Dom Perignon to mix with my fresh-squeezed Lebanese orange juice every morning, and a kennel full of blooded Bouviers to stand in contrast to my scarred lion dogs—but where and how would I use them? In play, against subtle men who think of hunting and fishing as games, like squash or golf, where the dead are merely markers.
But if he went home, Runner thought, there would be work as well. It wasn’t all play. He could study at natural history, maybe look deep into the ocean and see what it was like down there, help it stay alive. O
r maybe look the other way—into space—because there was always the chance of new, unspoiled worlds beyond the time barrier. . . .
“Who do you want to win?” he asked Twigan.
“Tilkut,” she answered without hesitation.
“Why?”
“He’s your father.”
Runner rolled his eyes and groaned. No help from that direction. He wiggled a fingertip in Twigan’s belly button and got to his feet, pulling on his pants and his boots but leaving his shirt off. The sinking sun still shed a delicious warmth. He walked over to the ketwai tree and checked the sap bucket: nearly full. Another hour or two. The tree was immense, its trunk green and black and shiny, like a snake’s back. Appropriate. He poured a cup of crait from the smoke-blackened pot over the cook fire and stirred some honey into it. Might as well get a little high, he thought. Plenty of time before we move out. . . .
Maybe I should go back and kill the both of them. It would be easy enough. I still have a few of those grenades. Wait until they’re both in Ratty’s cave, bullshitting each other the way they like to do, then pull the pin and let the spoon fly clear and toss the smoking ball right in there; plug my ears; kapow! No more problems.
But there would be problems. If I kill Ratnose, I might have to face off against Hunk, and that wouldn’t be much fun. And even though my father deserves to die, that prick! Killing my buddy Frac that way, the rotten bastard! Even though he deserves it, that miserable mammy-jammer, even so, he is my father. He cares for me. He brought me up here because he loves me, though it’s a strange way to show love, I guess; he probably thought it would make a man of me, hacking around up here with a bunch of robbers and mean animals.
I wonder if any kid ever really wanted to become a man? It’s a silly concept anyway—Be a Man! What else are you after you sprout hair on your balls and your voice changes, if not A Man? Well, some of them are pretty soft back there downriver, the ones with their suits and ties and righteous faith in the perfectability of humankind, their tired tears for the oppressed, and some of them are downright womanly with their vicious little digs and backbiting, sneaky, afraid to come right up to it and face it and fuck the consequences—yeah, like me right now: afraid to face it, the choice. Afraid of the country, too: its silence, how it never answers you—only stands there, old, old, so very old and changing so very slowly; rock, water, air, energy, matter, all ticking away forever and ever, the one thing changing gradually into the other and then back again or into a third thing while we emerge and change so fast, like one of those biology movies, seed into beanstalk into decay in three seconds flat.
That would be a hell of a scary movie: the history of man compressed into a couple of hours, the sloping foreheads bulging fast and steady like a bubble-gum bubble; zip, they’re wearing clothes now! Cities rising and falling before your eyes like bellows. Armies raised and wiped out in the snap of a finger. Man and his works spreading like spilled oil over the earth. First smoke, then rockets arcing into the sky. The oceans muddying suddenly, as if some giant fish had flirted its tail at the bottom of a shallow pond. The splutter of mushroom clouds. The earth covered with men and shit like a glazed doughnut at a picnic, ant-eaten. Then the end of man, the oil slick gathering back in on itself, the skies clearing, the seas clearing, nothing left but ice and bare rock. And then, slowly but fast enough so that its inevitability is obvious, the rock flaking into dirt, the dirt pushing up plants, the protocrab crawling out of the sea, studying the plants, nibbling one . . . Christ, the earth!
Stoned on time and doubt, Runner rose from his seat beside the fire. A tremendous awe filled him, an awe of the earth. He walked over to the Husky and kicked it into life. The desert— threat or promise, he would whip it or die trying. Without a glance at Twigan, he toed the gear shift, popped the clutch, and screwed down hard on the throttle. The bike leaped out like a charging grizzly, vaulted a hillock, and screamed off into the desolation. Twigan watched it go. Then she got up and began packing their gear and the last of the ketwai sap. She shouldered the pack and picked up the spare gasoline can. She hiked away from the river, following the ripped and studded track of Runners knobbies. As she walked, she sang a little song to herself, a song of the Hassayampa:
Once I saw a thunderstorm
That tore the sky with thunder
And shore the rocks with lightning
And rained in the fierceness of nature.
The world is crying, and I will sing
A song that speaks of everything. . . .
Once I saw the ocean,
With gray, foaming waves
That beat the strand unending
And sprayed my face with salt.
The world is crying, and I will sing
A song that speaks of everything. . . .
Once I saw a lake.
It was green as the grass, an emerald.
I saw my face, and worlds underwater.
The world is crying, so I will sing
A song that speaks of everything. . . .
47
RUNNER WRESTLED with the earth in much the same way he had wrestled with his father when he was a little boy. The earth’s weight, if you could put it on a scale, would come to about 6 sextillion 588 quintillion short tons. Runner and his bike weighed 392 pounds 7 ounces. The earth’s speed, flat out at the equator, is roughly 1,040 miles an hour. Runner’s top speed, in the straights with his belly tight along the tank and his feet on the back pegs and the grip screwed tight, was 89.664 miles an hour.
Runner didn’t give a damn about the odds.
I’ll whip your ass, you mother, he yelled silently to himself as he tore across the desert. His dope-crazed flesh had become one with the motorcycle, his eyes knobbed rubber, his tendons coiled steel, his lymph and blood now oil and gasoline. The violent vibrations of motor and earth blended into a fine, steady roar, a tingle punctuated with shocks, that climbed his spine and infected his brain, both feeding and refining his inchoate rage, honing it down to an awl of metal and fire that punched through the wasteland with aimless resolution. No next, no then: just now.
A hill before him, he climbed it—flew in its face, split its lip, singed its moustache, scoured snot from its nose with his flailing tires.
A draw beneath him, he violated it—wrenched its bush, tweaked its twot, scattered slime and water with a raging blast of his exhaust.
He leaped crevasses, vaulted boulders, kissed the hard shoulders of cliffs with his knees; he slid through spiky thickets of thorn and puckerbush, sinuating, squashing snakes and feeling the bite of wood in his naked chest, his arms, his brow. Blood flew behind him in a thin pink contrail; pink spit streamed from his mouth; he swallowed blood, loving it, feeding on it.
The earth raced to meet his eyes—tan, tough, warped, and strong in its infinite variety, outrageous in its disregard. He met that hard neutrality with his own skill, imagining the challenge even as he imagined and, a split second later, put into action its solution. And as he raced across the desert, across the face of his adversary, he slowly began to realize that the wounds he was inflicting were not wounds at all, only tracks, temporal; that the earth itself was unconcerned with his transgression. That the earth is the original sadomasochist, meting out pain and accepting it with equal aplomb.
His rage began to fade even as his skill began to fail. He no longer was one with the machine. A boulder reared before him—popped right out of the ground, it seemed—and in that split-second change of his head, he lost it, lost it all; the bike (insensate now) bounced, bent itself like a bronco, the roar of the engine sickening, dying, and Runner flew through the air. . . .
Twigan trudged along in the waning light, swinging the gas can and watching the trail. She poked at the crushed snakes and lizards with a stick. One of them, a rattler, was still alive. She watched it trying to crawl away, unaware that its squashed guts, in combination with a hot sun, had glued it to the rock where Runners wheels had surprised it. The snake writhed irritably, searching for a better p
urchase, for a traction that was impossible, given the drag of its own congealed flesh and body fluids. She watched it for a long time, taking a swig from the canteen, enjoying her rest. The snake finally became aware of her presence. It buzzed its rattle and shot its tongue, attempting to coil but unable to do so except imperfectly, owing to its wound. Its bright eye searched for her. She sat quietly, curious. Finally the snake calmed down and once again concentrated on getting under way: it was almost night; it needed warmth. She left it wriggling busily, unaware of its own already patent death.
A little farther on she found Runner, sitting next to the bike. He was covered with scabs where the thorns had ripped him, and his nose was twice its usual size. She handed him his shirt, and he winced as he put it on. He took the gas can and refilled the bike. The sun was gone, but an afterglow remained. The moon was just rising. Runner put his hand on the back of her neck and looked at her very closely.
Blood Sport Page 20
