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Boogie 'Til You Die
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The sounds from the all-Sicilian mariachi jug band reached levels of enthusiasm not even imagined the night before. Suspicions dampened things at the start, but between Don Guido's assurances and the picture of the angel cakes, Don Pau and his commanders decided that they didn't have to trust us as long as they guarded us very closely.
I didn't think the plan would work at first. The double number of guards surrounding us held their weapons at the ready, and kept their eyes on the dunes surrounding the camp. As the curiously Latin rhythms of the jug band filled the wide area between the dunes, however, the laughter and cheers filled the night air. Bit by bit the attention of the guards was drawn to the hundreds of dancing couples.
Despite the frosty air, the women had taken off their sheets to dance, and most of them were dancing barefoot as well. In some cases, what had begun as short shorts had been rolled down and tucked up until I was beginning to steam a bit myself As the air got colder, the more animated they became, and the more the guards and reserve soldiers turned green with envy. Don Guido was dancing with Maranta, and Pau Avanti's attention never wavered an inch from her the entire time, which was the point.
The plan had been a simple one based upon an awareness of a few of my own character defects. Thanks to Big Dave, CSA, and a lot of reading, I understood macho man very well. Take one insecure male who is terrified of women, teach him to compensate by treating women like pieces of meat, and you have created a curious kind of addict. I made a mental note to remember that should I ever live long enough to make it back to another CSA meeting.
Anyway, to keep down his fear of women, the more women macho man must have. Of course, the more women macho man has, the more he is frightened of them. This isn't how macho man sees, feels, or thinks, however. Macho man sees other men as threats and sees women as either spare mules or possible sexual partners. Macho man feels nothing except terror and deprivation, which he frequently interprets as horniness. Macho man thinks with his dick.
I knew all that, and I knew that there was a big slice of macho man left in me. I watched the angel cakes dance, and there is something about a woman's buns the sight of which ought to be listed as a controlled substance. I can watch them move and bounce around for just so long, then I feel compelled to leap out there and sink my teeth into some young thing's bottom—
—or, at least, that's the way I used to think before I became enlightened and got all better.
The primary motivating force behind macho man is not sex. It is envy. Right then I felt envy. If I felt deprived, I could just imagine what the guards and the soldiers on reserve were feeling.
I tore my gaze away from the beautiful bouncing bottoms and began checking out the guards. We couldn't be lucky enough to have nothing but macho types carrying the weapons. There had to be a few dedicated types who actually were standing guard, maybe a couple of closet gays, but I couldn't find them.
At the edge of the dancing area, there were couples on spread sheets who were doing some numbers. I listened as one woman cooed in her macho man's ear: "Not just yet, honey. We don't want to end the night just yet do we? Be patient. Take it easy." All of the time she was saying those things, she was kissing the guy's ear and stroking his scrotum. The subject of the exercise was having a meltdown.
There was a pause in the music. Every girl had the physical attention of one or two soldiers from the Hand, and close observations of the guards and reserves. I found Bloody Sarah lying on a sheet, looking in my direction. The Hand commander of the Loyal Reds, Padra Amitis, was up to his ears in her breasts. I nodded at her, and she bent over and whispered something to Padra. He pulled out his face, took a few gulps of air, and shouted toward the band, "Play 'My Old Kentucky Home'."
As the uppermost edges of the dunes surrounding us seemed to undulate with the passage of mysterious dark shapes, each one of the women whispered at her partner, filling his ear with the provisions of the first law of the Razai. Along with the whisper there was a sharp instrument that had been positioned in a tender place. The members of the Hand were being given the choice to either join, or die.
The strains of the ancient song filled the night as the women whispered and the dark shapes slithered down the faces of the dunes toward the backs of the guards. I positioned myself next to Atan Voam while Garoit stood behind Pau Avanti. On the first note of the repeat, I threw my arm around Atan's throat, held my cutter against his jugular vein and hissed in his ear, "Join the Razai or die! Choose!"
"No! I—"
I ripped open his throat and let him fall. As Pau Avanti slumped back with an ice pick thrust into his temple, I assumed that Garoit's selling job had been no more successful than my own. I went for the guards who were at Garoit's back. One of them tried to bring up a rifle. I blocked the rifle with my arm and shoved my cutter into his chest. His scream joined the hundreds that tore at the night air.
I picked up his weapon and began shooting as the Razai surrounding the perimeter killed the guards and rushed in against the reserves, who immediately began scrambling for their weapons. Before they got to them, two of the angel cakes playing grope-grope in the shadow of the tents thinned their escorts and ran along the rifle stacks, knocking them over into a tangle of weapons.
A rifle went off next to my ear, I could feel my hair being blown to the other side of my head, and I turned to my right to see Galvin O'Goomba fighting with a jammed weapon. "Galvin," I shouted, "Don't be a fool! Join us and stay alive!"
"There's only two thousand of you," he said as he lifted his rifle for another try. "In the mountains the Hand has over half a million mounted warriors!"
I fired at his chest, drilling him through the heart. After he buried his face in the sand I said, "You did the smart thing, Galvin. There's no doubt about that." I knew a little about Galvin O'Goomba, and I would have liked to have spent some time over his cooling corpse, but there was no time.
I saw Marietta with Rhome Nazzar's group as they charged into the center of the Hand's reserve force. She had one goomba by the throat and a second by his hair. I saw Mano Leaf, commander of the Golds, catch a familiar hatchet in the back of his head as the living stepped over Padra Amitis's blood-drained body. I couldn't find Sarah anywhere, but I knew the white slice would be out there somewhere thinning the crop.
Ow Dao and his troops put down a base of fire against the eastern guards, and Mig Rojas and his gang burst through and crumbled that half of the camp.
Perhaps only a hundred and fifty men of the Hand managed to get to their weapons, load them, and form into a defensive circle under the command of Dagi Preit of the Mighty Blacks. Nance called to them and read them the first law while the Hand's weapons and ammo was distributed among the Razai. To a man, the Mighty Blacks chose death. It took less than a minute of firing to silence their weapons. In minutes more the dead were stripped of their weapons, ammo, and clothes. I stopped to take a breath and look around. At the place of honor, Marantha was bandaging up Don Guido's arm and giving him all kinds of teary kisses. I felt a stab of that envy, and it confused me. I shook it out of my head and looked around.
In the center of the dance area I could see that at least two-thirds of the Hand's men had come up with the wrong answer when they were quizzed about joining the Razai. There were several dead women among them. I moved among the dead angel cakes, feeling guilty because I didn't know all their names. They paid for our future with their own. That deserved at least a line in a book. A memory.
Then I saw one I knew, and I took a sheet to her side. I held the sheet as I knelt down on the sand and looked at Seraphine Clay, the D.C. Chopper, one of Nazzar's ten best. I would've thought that she was too old to bounce buns with the num-nums, but she was looking good. She had pushed an ice pick into the eye of her partner, but someone had gotten to her from behind.
I saw droplets of water splash on her bare middle
and realized that I was crying. I removed her hand from the ice pick, arranged her arms and covered her with a sheet. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked behind me. Marietta was standing there and Nance was behind her.
"It worked, Bando," said Nance, "but its not over. We still have to convince the Loyal Reds in the east camp who are back there guarding the women that it's over. We have over a thousand rifles now. That'll make convincing them a lot easier."
Marietta squeezed my shoulder. "There's plenty time for tears after the battle, Chief."
"What about Stays and Cap?"
"Stays got his scalp creased, but that's all. The RCs are fine. What about you?"
I looked back down at Seraphine. "Did you know the Chopper knew astronomy?" I lowered the sheet on Seraphine's face and turned toward Nance. "When we have the place surrounded, let me go in to talk to the Reds."
"That wasn't the plan," said Nance. "I'm supposed to read them the first law."
"So I'm making a new plan." I dried my face with my palms. "Let me do it, Nance. Please."
Bloody Sarah, her playtime rompers soaked with someone else's blood, walked up to us as she pulled on a parka and a sheet against the cold.
"Nance, it's Garoit. He's been hurt. Jane Sheene did what she could, but she says he won't make it." Sarah had something in her hand. She lifted her arm and held it toward me. It was a book. As soon as I touched the cover, I recognized Southey's Life of Nelson.
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A Candle for Pussyface
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While they gathered up and assigned the weapons, and collected tents, wagons, sleds, animals, and anything else that wasn't on fire, I knelt next to Darrell Garoit. Nance was seated on the sand and Garoit's head was resting in her lap. His belly was all bandaged up, but the bandages hadn't slowed the bleeding down much.
Nance brushed the sand from Garoit's face and smoothed his hair back from his forehead. I held his hand, and he squeezed back with more strength than I thought he had.
"Bando, you remember the ship?" he whispered.
"I remember."
"Remember me saying how I was going to run things, take over, make a new world?"
"Yeah."
"You must've thought I was incredibly stupid—" He tensed with the pain and sweat broke out on his face. "God, I feel sick." He looked up at me. "I feel so bloody useless, like I'm a mistake—some grotesque kind of joke God played on the universe. There's nothing I ever did right. Nothing that ever worked out. I failed on Earth, I failed here. I couldn't even thin Pau Avanti without getting my guts ripped out."
He closed his eyes then opened them. He looked up at the belly of the Spider. "Bando, I always aimed so high and every time missed the mark so wide I kept shooting myself in the foot. I'm going to die, Bando, right here in the middle of a wasteland on a planet that's a human garbage dump. I'm going to die, and I don't have a single candle to bring with me. I don't have anything to show but a worthless heap of good intentions."
I squeezed his hand back. "Listen, Pussyface, if it wasn't for you, there wouldn't be any Razai."
"Play it in Paducah."
"I mean it. We're not a gang run by whoever's the toughest or meanest. We're not a gang at all, we're a democracy. When it came time to change leaders or policy, it was you who said we vote on it. The big fist doesn't command here. You put the people in charge of the Razai. That's why we're going to go and rescue those women instead of raping them ourselves. You did that—"
His hand was still. There was no strength left in it. I held his hand for a few moments more, then placed his arm at his side and looked at his face.
"He heard you," said Nance. "I'm sure he heard you."
I looked at her and there were tears in her eyes. "Damn you, Pussyface," she said. "Damn you for leaving me alone."
I stood up and turned away. It wasn't something for me to see or hear. After a few moments I heard Nance stand up. I turned around and Garoit was covered with a sheet. Nance picked up her rifle and handed me one.
"Okay, chili pepper. Right now I'm all the Razai has for a boss. You go in and talk to the Reds. If you can talk them out of a fight, I suppose that would be okay. To tell you the honest truth, though, I feel like butchering the lot."
I checked the load on the rifle she gave me, and nodded. "Let's go." We found the column, a thousand rifles strong, and joined it.
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Love Letters in the Sand
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As we marched through the night, I thought of Alna. I felt I should go and chase her down, but I was heading in the wrong direction for that. My head was filled with what ifs. What if she was already dead? What if when she catches up with Nkuma she doesn't want me any more? But why worry about that, I thought to myself, when the Reds might thin me on the spot?
I had the same sickness that had filled me after the first battle. It was a peculiar bone in my body that kept saying someday the killing has got to stop. But it was all confused with hurting over Alna, hurting over Garoit and the Chopper. I didn't know who else had been killed, and right then I didn't want to know.
I saw Marantha, now wearing a sheet. Her rifle was slung and she was walking a little farther back in the column. I slowed until I was walking next to her. "How's Herb?" I asked.
She looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed. "You mean Don Guido?"
"Yes."
"His name is Herb?"
"You remember him. Herb Ollick from Tenbene v. Ollick?"
"No kidding?" She held her hand to her head. "Of course! H.O. Herb Ollick. He wrote Mob Cinderella." Marantha shook her head.
"Some detective. I never recognized him. Brother crowbar, does that ever explain a lot of things." She glanced at me. "He's okay. He took a round through his upper arm, but it didn't break the bone." Her lips pulled into a grin. "He did quite a job as Don Guido, didn't he?"
"Spectacular. Tell me, how did you know he was playing the part of Don Guido? Did Minnie fill you in?"
Marantha laughed and shook her head. "No. No one told me. No one had to tell me."
"Then how did you know?"
"Did you ever get a love letter, Bando?"
"Love letter? No. I never got a love letter."
"I did. It was in the form of a prison play called Mob Cinderella. It was my fourth month in the Crotch and one of the stains hand delivered a copy of the script to my cell. On the cover was written Nance Damas's name asking me if I wanted to try out for one of the parts in the play."
She shrugged her shoulders and looked down. "I was in Hell right then. I don't know how you feel about what happened to me—"
"Everyone inside knew you weren't guilty, Marantha," I interrupted.
"Thanks. Thanks for that." She brought her head up. "So I was almost dissolved in self-pity when the script was delivered. I started reading it, and I wasn't two pages into the thing when I realized that Maranta Argento was me, and that Mob Cinderella was a love letter to me." She smiled.
"How did you figure it out? Do you speak Italian?"
"No, but argentum is Latin for silver. So Maranta Argento, Marantha Silver."
"You speak Latin?"
"A little. I needed it for my law degree."
I stopped dead in the sand and pulled her to a stop next to me. "You're a cockroach?"
"I never practiced law, Bando. I needed the degree to become an agent in the MJ." She began walking again and I fell in beside her. "So Maranta Argento fell in love with Guido Abalone a long time ago. That's how I knew who he was. No one else could look or act like that." She glanced at me. "So, Guido Abalone is Herb Ollick?"
"Yes."
"He isn't connected at all, is he?"
"He's an illusionist from Dayton, Ohio. Pretty good with a knife, too."
"He's also very brave, and very much in love with me." She thought for a s
econd and nodded. "I am very much in love with him." She grinned as she turned toward me. "Give us your blessing, Chief."
I nodded and increased the length of my stride. "I have to get up at the head of the column." I left her behind in the dark.
Love. The word was an accusation, a curse.
Where was I about Alna? Why should I give a damn? Why was Bando Nicos crippled inside because some little mau bit took off into the night?
If there's one thing the Razai had plenty of, it was women, and all shades, too. Some of them were chili peppers and spoke the brown sugar. So who cared if Alna took off? Who needed her? Who cared if a couple of haystacks, some bomb thrower and a hatchet-killer, get thinned? I got along my whole life without Alna Moah, Seraphine Clay, and Darrell Garoit. I could again.
So a Jew cop gets a love letter from some fat bastard who can't tell if he's in the real world or flying through dreamland. Why should Bando Nicos get all teary-eyed about that, or about anything?
What was it that guard had said to me on the way out the hatch? Something about anytime before I arrive at the gates of Hell, I can change my own luck. His name had been Crawford. I spat on the sand. What did Crawford know about me, about Tartaros, or about the gates of Hell? I looked up at the belly of the Spider. Wasn't there a committee up there somewhere that measured out and dispensed the shit that landed on everybody? Hadn't that committee, time after time, taken the same vote? Dump it on Bando Nicos and then see if there's any left over?
Change my luck, my ass. You don't just start things and move them. Events snag you and drag you along, and the only thing you can do is look out for the bumps and wriggle around to try and miss them. Tartaros was a fine example of that. The Razai flew in the teeth of that, however. We were different. Events were dragging us all around down here on the sand, but Garoit had thrown in a spike, stopped it, and said, "we vote on it." The direction had changed. There were more spikes. Kegel's gang hadn't thinned us. We had turned our luck around and had taken them out. We owed Garoit for that one, too.
Nazzar and the no prisoners vote made us over into something completely different again. And with the unanimous vote of the Razai behind us, we had beaten the Hand and were off to stop a crime and the only thing we could be sure of was that we were doing the right thing. Not the smart thing—the right thing.
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