This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  I had while confined often imagined slipping up behind him in the dark. Or let us instead of him, rather say it. Behind it. Close enough to tap it on the shoulder: “May I have this dance?” Smooth as ice. Silent as stars. The same ones that it shall, I know, shortly be seeing.

  I had been rehearsing this scene for months.

  So that when the time arrived, I could not feel my heart thumping. Did not hear the bloodrush in my ears or jangling of my nerves. My palms were dry as chalk, my hands steady as a jeweler’s. My breathing regular. My throat and lips moist. My knees strong. My stance right-balanced, lock-firm fast.

  My thoughts were…I believe I had no thoughts. None that I recall. I believe my mind was blank. A blank. White as whitewash.

  I was as alert as a coil. That I do recall. I remember thinking, “Soy cobra.”

  So what are you waiting for?

  The flash-move is silent-smooth. No whoosh, no ripple. My upheld left hand clutches one rope-end just behind its right shoulder as my right fast-loops the other up, over and around its head on its left-side, arcing across in a semi-circle counterclockwise.

  Upon which I yank. Both directions. Opposite. At once. Right and left. Hard apart. I have by my ordeal been weakened. Now I am suddenly strong. I summon the strength both available and unavailable to me. I yank and continue yanking, hard as I can.

  Its arms fly up to its neck. Its hands claw at the taut, tautening, tautened rope. Too late. Its body bucks this way, then that, thrashing. I hear it gurgle. Pig-snort. Spray spit.

  It tries to twist its head, to wrench it, arms flying back behind its head trying to reach, grasp, grapple, trying to grab hold, get at me.

  I yank harder. Then harder still. I redouble my yanking, reckoning that right about now its eyes are beginning to bulge out of their sockets, its tongue blackening, protruding fat as a toad between its bluing lips.

  I reckon that its trachea is slowly being crushed as I feel, then hear something give. A structure giving way. Crumpling. Crunching. A cartilage. I reckon that its lungs are burning up. Combusting. That its heart is fixing to burst.

  And then it plunges, but in increments, to its knees. The arms drop slowly, then fall quickly to their sides. The head lolls, droops, nods and pitches forward, chin-point upon chest. Slack. Limp. I feel the tug of the whole weight of its sag against the rope, befallen.

  Motionless, soundless. Unmuscled and unbreathing. Undone.

  Deadweight. Dead meat.

  And it is then that it defecates. Or perhaps it had done so earlier, but I had failed to notice. I smell the smell only then.

  So keep yanking. Harder. Tighter. Another minute, half-minute, a minute or two more before I let go. Unwind the rope. Let the body fall. Its carcass. Let its corpse fall facedown to eat earth.

  No more keeping now. No more kilns to keep.

  And then turn, turn and without a word walk rapidly away, thinking—I suddenly realize that I am thinking, that my thinking has resumed without my thinking about it—“It makes you wonder, what kind of bother is death? What kind of mess is involved on such occasions? Self-made mess. Man-made mess. And life, really, little better.”

  Turn and walk away thinking to myself, about myself: “¿El Verdugo, eh hombre? Soy, El Verdugo.”

  The Executioner.

  I am, throughout, not wearing a mask.

  (…in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside… a style that has got the future wrong.)

  For what they may be worth in their recounting—I suspect not a lot—my dreams—and I take it that they were dreams and not visions or hallucinations—my dreams during the period of my imprisonment, as for some while thereafter, remained curiously non-descript save for several degrees of gyroscopic tilt and temporal warpage possessed of an uncalibrated register and range of catch-as-catch-can discontinuity that saddled me with a sense of being my own pluperfect assailant.

  Does any of that make any sense whatever? Need it?

  Perhaps I can be clearer. What happens in such a situation, at least what happened to me, at least as best I can recollect it, is that one…shrinks. Constricts. Shrivels. Balls up even as one feels oneself emptying out. That is, one’s reality does. One’s reality comprises naught but a diminution, a shrinkage inside oneself, down into oneself, as if into the very narrowed marrow of one’s own deepest dreamt, self-devouring bones.

  Oddly enough, I seldom dreamed of my mother or wife or child, neighbor or colleague, friend or enemy, or any recognizable person familiar or otherwise. Or when I did, if I did, I did so most unvividly, even evanescently, as if steeped in claude glass.

  Brute Nature either.

  What this might be said to say about me or the state I then was in I hesitate to remark beyond assuming that I indeed was, at that time, in such a state, being myself not entirely present, save, of course, figuratively. I could not say where I was materially, corporeally, in point of concrete fact. Or even if I was. For I seemed to have lost track, all such knack.

  Asleep perhaps. Dreaming perhaps. Out of body perhaps. A figure of vapor perhaps.

  Difficult to get out of one’s own way at times, one darts off so quickly, so obliquely that one stubs one’s toe upon one’s aberrant absence at every vagrant turn, held as one must be at arm’s length against oneself.

  In any event, not there, direct, specific, tactile experience of that sort, the violence in my left haunch for instance or locked crick in my neck, being, while shackled, either unavailable to me or happily deferred or detoured, i.e. entirely lost, but not wholly gone, one being of but no longer in the moment as those moments followed contiguously, if no longer sequentially much less chronologically, each upon the next.

  (Generally speaking, things can, I like to believe, be said to occur in the right order, or at least an order, or where they do not, can be emended and revised later by memory to constitute another version that may better accord with said haphazard and deranged disarrangement. This is especially true as it pertains to torture and self-torture.)

  Insofar as this begins to sound like madness or some semblance thereof, that is because when one finds oneself in trouble of a certain dire and “unreal” sort, precisely the sort I found myself in while kilned at Anahuac, and one discovers that that which is “real” fails to provide a solution to that trouble, or even some little relief, one has little option save to seek escape and refuge in that which is not real or less real or even unreal as a more useful, effective and, ultimately, sane alternative, the real having proven itself not only useless, not only chimerical, but altogether inimical.

  Sometimes, when one is in extremis, say, the truth is that the truth is most useful when its truth is eschewed. This might be characterized less as vanquishing or triumphing over it, than dissociating or disassociating oneself from it, since its purpose always is to tear time in two. Or, as I often thought of it during those interminable two months, to “push the pain away,” something I intermittently was able to accomplish by repeating to myself the mantra, Fear of death is the ember of life/Fear of death is the ember of life/Fear of death and so on ad infinitum.

  My dreams, as I recall their factual content, perhaps I mean fractal content, or what masqueraded as such, adhered over and over again to the selfsame pattern of composing and then hideously dismembering themselves; besides being perfectly unpeopled and arrestingly uneventful, they were likewise absent recognizable location or ground or depth of field or concretized context or frame or framing device, as they were bereft of all quiddity and sense of quiddity, whether that of the occasional unraked vacant lot or recently raked-dry and riprapped gulch.

  My breathing, shallow as it increasingly was, was smoothed to visibility, gray as grisaille across the surface of a mirror while cupping a hummingbird in my hand, perhaps to afford it a measure of respite from the ice floe fragments flowing—some few blued in shimmering seafoamed flotillas—along a pitch-pined peninsular lakeshore at first light, even as some undesignated embouchure bone-whistl
ed up a sleighbelled storm to no apparent purpose.

  Such conjurations, you may believe, were suffused with neither guilt nor regret nor shame. None, at least, that was palpable to me. Only confusion as seamlessly uncontoured as a face effaced of its features. No object, no image, no definitive image of object, no objectified image, only untethered abstractions manifested as a sourcelessly random yet apparently compulsory plunge or slippage—triggered by seizure? convulsion? transient stroke of some sort? In any case, an immersion amidst a free-floating, free-falling chaos buoyed day after day by an attitude of non-acquiescent acceptance whilst staked s—p—r—e—a—d eagled spangled in flame, even splurged in it (as I literally felt, at moments, moments as fraught as they were unforgiving) within that airless coffin of a kiln. It was an immersion, thank god, in which for a few brief moments here and there I was able to LOSE myself, pump myself clean as rinse water, baptismal water white as albedo, as, to remain even marginally sane, I found I so often was obliged to imagine it.

  Meanwhile, in my fading in and out moments of cruel lucidity and pellucidity, at least insofar as I still was capable of mustering them, I could only pray, perhaps foolishly, that it someday might yet be possible to live something like a dignified if not entirely meaningful life despite the indignity upon indignity I was suffering and suspected I would, once released, continue to suffer.

  Certain damage, once done, cannot be undone.

  This is all I wish to say and will be saying about my “kiln time,” about my dreams and my dreaming and/or non-dreaming of them. Altogether necessary, perhaps, but singularly unpleasant.

  Dreams are tough nuts to crack.

  C.V. : Episteme & Doxa

  Name:

  William Barret Travis. Cognomen, “Buck.” Acquired upon being thrown from his horse as a youth. Less familiarly, “Will.” The middle name, Barret, being the phonetic analog of his paternal grandfather’s surname, Barrick or Berwick.

  Birthplace:

  Mine Creek, Red Bank Community, Edgefield District, Saluda County, far-western South Carolina, some 20 miles east of the Georgia border.

  Birthdate:

  August 1, 1809. Eldest of 11 children of Mark Butler Travis described as “a perfect scoundrel, a rogue and rounder, rake and roué,” and Jemima Stallworth, who reared him according to the dictum: “We are free to do nothing, save what we must.”

  Education:

  Sparta Academy, Conecuh County, Sparta, Alabama (grammar school). McCurdy Academy, Monroe County, Claiborne, Alabama (secondary school). “Reads the law” under James Dellet, head of the Claiborne bar, to which he is admitted, February 1829.

  Wife:

  Rosanna Cato. Married, October 1828. Age 16. Separation, April 1831. Divorced (“spousal desertion”), January 1836.

  Fiance:

  Rebecca Cummings. Betrothed, April 2, 1834. Age 24.

  Children:

  Charles Edward. Born, August 1828.

  Occupation:

  Teacher, McCurdy Academy. Owner and editor, Claiborne Herald. Attorney-at-law, Claiborne and Gosport, Alabama, Anahuac and San Felipe, Texas. Land-owner (7,000 acres in East Texas). Slave-owner (he prefers “lifetime indenturist”) of Ben, Jared, Jack, John, James, Simeon, Eliza, Callie, Joe. Colonial Secretary, Austin’s Colony. Commander, Texas Volunteer Cavalry. Colonel, Texas Regular Army.

  Religion:

  Christian, Protestant (baptized Baptist; in Texas, member of Caney Creek Methodist Church), anti-sectarian, anti-papist. Publicly deplores, “the Catholic superstitions that infect the daily lives of the impoverished and ignorant peoples of Tejas,” and denounces “the priestcraft as it is practiced in this country as little better than witchcraft, though more harmful and corrupt.”

  Description:

  Height, median. Weight, middling. Build, medium. Eye color, a midmost blue that “bounds and bounces yet bonds.” Hair color, a spongy ginger possessed of nutmeggy cinnamon highlights, but of a body and texture so ungovernably topsy-turvical and insubordinately whirlaway, so fraught with squally, slipshodden surges, convulsive swells and involucred, convolvulous, jack-in-the-box eruptions, that it requires superintending by a thrice-daily currycombing into an extravagantly pomaded, aspirationally precipiced quiff or gradiently scaffolded escarpment. Dentition, transpicuously mediocre, though neither malocclusive nor incisorally resuscitative. Complexion, mildly mottled, though less splotchy than spider-veined, yet not so bungled as to appear pocked or pitted, dysplastically moled or lentigined. Musculature, by any measure sufficiently sinewy i.e. thewy. Ossature, contentioned and cuttled, if oddly spurred and notchily gnarled. Nervature, synaptically tensile. Metabolism, in its high intensity strivings to keep pace, decidedly spotty. Voice, when lifted in song a yaargh-inflected “Irish tenor;” when spoken in casual conversation a resonantly mid-range, mint-julepy drawl muddled through with spriggy if semi-drizzled nonrhotic half-tones less lubriciously leisured than frankly honeydewed; when projected in a courtroom or before a crowd wont to a gargly hoarsening. Habits, immoderately moderate save for whoring, gambling (cards, dice, darts, faro, ponies), dancing, trading in expensive horseflesh and affecting bespoke, dandyish clothing. A “regular” reader of newspapers and books (Scott, Donne, Blake, Don Quixote, Le Morte d’Arthur, the Bible—particularly the Book of Revelation which he has committed somewhat to memory). An “obsessive” diarist, journalizer, log-and-ledger keeper, chronicler and letter writer who prides himself on his “calligraphically exquisite hand.”

  Personality/Temperament:

  Quoting a self-reflective excerpt from his diary, an entry titled STOCK-TAKING: “I can be overproud, even prickly, though I am seldom boorish despite being unpleasant as circumstances may require or insulting as a person may merit it. If I am sometimes too slow to laugh or quick to stand on ceremony I am not entirely humorless. If I am quick to ruffle I am no less quick to smooth back. Irascible but not querulous; bumptious but not quarrelsome; intemperate but not petulant; brusque and abrupt but not combative; blunt but not imperious; aloof but not condescending; impolitic but not ill-mannered. Certainly I am ambitious though less for material wealth than the respect, recognition and approbation of my peers. I am conscientious to a fault in the discharge of my sworn duties and professional responsibilities though I may appear so guarded that others think me secretive and conniving. In my person I am uncommonly clean and fastidiously neat, even immaculate; a veritable Tartar, I cannot abide muss. While prey to bouts of earnest over-seriousness and solipsistic brooding I much enjoy a good time, having fun, even an occasional spot of prankishness and horseplay. I certainly am no natural leader of men, having neither that knack nor any aspiration to it. So many of them, those whom one would lead, whom require being led, I find frankly ill-bred, uncouth, vulgar and not to be abided in proper company. (Reading back over what I just have written here I am not pleased. The portrait, while honest enough, is far from flattering. Indeed it strikes me as that of a rather thorny and sharp-elbowed fellow, one slightly superior if not snobbish, exacting though not priggish, self-involved though not uncaring, and, all in all, significantly flawed and fallible. Much a mixed review. And so I resolve now to redouble my strivings to overcome my many shortcomings, address my several deficiencies and attend assiduously to my failings, not only for my own sake, but for those of others. In this, I wish me good sir, godspeed!)”

  Three-legged Willie

  The sodality to come, as the propinquity I was to enjoy on account, I never could have conceived of much less anticipated. To think, once I was back in San Felipe, that I would find myself feted, the toast of the town, a cause celebre—if one shortly to have a $1,000 Mexican bounty slapped upon his head—one clamoured after not only to deliver speeches upon this or that neighborhood stump, but to write for public consumption about my Anahuac experience, was as unexpected as it was gratifying. For weeks after my return I found myself unable to walk the streets without being accosted by one well-wisher or another insisting that he be permitted to stand me a drink.<
br />
  The piece I eventually submitted and that subsequently appeared in the Brazoria Texas Gazette, the San Felipe Telegraph and Register, and the New Orleans Louisiana Advertiser, while not my own in every tittle and jot—no editor who ever lived ever managed successfully to resist the impulse to improve upon that which requires no improvement—was far from my most concinnous, but looking back, I am satisfied that it was the best of which I was capable in light of the circumstances at the time. To wit:

  The unpardonable humiliations suffered during my jungled night of the famished soul I was obliged in darkest despair and strictest isolation, not unlike the Apostle, manfully to forbear. Save that where St. Paul was by his jailers permitted parchment and quill, I was by my wardens told: ‘¿Usted desea escribir, eh? ¡Luego escribe, cabrón! ¡Escribe en la tinta de su sangre en su paredes manchadas de sangre! ¡Y cuando eso se seca, en su mierda!’ (You wish to write, eh? Then write, bastard! Write in the ink of your blood upon your blood-stained walls! And when that runs dry, in your shit!)

  And so on and on in a similar vein for perhaps another half-dozen paragraphs before I concluded with:

  Stand or fall, we Texians must do so on our own. It is the duty now of every individual to protect himself, that self which is subject legally and constitutionally to no power on earth save his own, his sovereign self. Countrymen, open your eyes! Awake! Audaces fortuna iuvat. Fortuna audax iuvat. Fortes fortuna adiuvat. Fortune favors the brave. God smiles upon the righteous. To the victor the fruits of his freedom. Tejas! Tejas! Tejas! Tejas right or wrong, swim or sink, win or lose, live or die.

  It was shortly after the article appeared that we received the news: Anahuac Garrison had been disbanded, its troops evacuated. A week or so later, more news still: the fort had by the locals been put to the torch.