And the Ass Saw the Angel

by Nick Cave

  In the left-side pocket of the jacket was a small green velvet box. Inside it lay four medals, side by side, each snug in its own velvet dent. Brassy and embossed, they hung heavily from thin strips of coloured silk and ah pinned them to mah left breast, which was already studded with gold bars and bright, striped ribbons.

  Using the treadle of an old sewing machine and a whetstone that ah probably stole from one of the cane store-sheds and a primitive system of axles, cogs and belts, ah had built a knife-grinder. Ah ground down the rusty sickle that ah had found in the swampland the day the scum from town went and desecrated mah grotto – remember? – and kicked mah world to bits. Now the sickle shone a wicked silver, curled sinister like a witch’s finger, slung through mah belt pirate-style.

  In the mirror, mah hair now long, ah looked like a fucken prince. A King. King Euchrid the First. Monarch of Doghead. Don’t fuck with the King, brother. Don’t fuck with the King. And then ah looked again to Heaven and again ah gave Him thanks.

  There was a hat, which ah tossed in the trash. Ah hate hats. There were maps and logs and official papers which ah searched for further orders. But ah found only a lot of figgers, equations, nautical jargon from which ah could glean no further instructions – nothing. The Captain’s diaries were crammed with a dense, minuscule scrawl. It was clear that the tedious process of unravelling these knotted ramblings would not benefit me at all. God’s word is plain. It is straight and true. This is no game that we are playing here.

  As ah tossed the journals aside two photographs slipped from their pages on to the ground. One was of Captain Quickborn. He was bigger than me and much, much older and he had a heavy white beard and wore a cap, but seeing his image and the reflection of mahself, there in the long mirror, ah was struck by the momentary likeness between him and me, me and him, caught there, inside the glass. Ah knew his eyes were blue and though his face seemed rugged, even swarthy in the sepia tones of the photograph, it was obvious that the sea and salt had been instrumental in darkening what was once a pale and bloodless complexion – like mine. Sure – coincidence. But, believe me and ah should know, coincidences stack up.

  Reaching for the second photograph, mah hand froze mid-stretch as its content became clearer. It was a photograph of his ship – the bow of his ship. It was a photograph of the figurehead, there upon the bow of the ship. It was the head and torso of a girl-child, fashioned from wood and painted with a soft, round face framed in long golden curls. A chaplet of flowers sat upon her head and two angel wings spread backwards along the starboard and port sides of the bow. Thin shouldered with two small, budding breasts, the figurehead seemed the veritable image of her. Beth. But her name was not Beth. It was NATASHA I, as was carved in block letters on a plate beneath the tip of her port-side wing. NATASHA I. Ah saw the photograph reflected in the mirror and for a moment ah was transfixed by what ah saw – the image of Beth unner which was written I AH SATAN! I AM SATAN!

  ‘So, what’s new?’ ah thought and tossed the pictures, maps and log books into a far corner of the shack with the rest of the junk.

  Ah pulled from the chest a battered tubular case made of leather and wood and ah opened it at one end and out slid a black telescope. A telescope! In three slipping segments! A third sliding eye! An instant spyhole that breached the grey vagaries of distance – that eradicated the possibility of detection. An unblinking optic on an extendable stalk!

  A rush of pure blood-power coursed through mah veins, and mah heart, a clenched inner fist, punched me from mah seat, mah locomotive organs already racing. Ah bounded on to the porch, the telescope folded unner mah arm – mah right and mighty arm, with its gilded wrist and golden shoulder – and standing on the south end of the porch ah uncapped the saucer-sized lens and, working it up to its full magnificence, ah aimed the long, black rod at the town. Ah twisted the telescope’s big eye in and out of focus, homing in on Memorial Square in search of the white marble angel wielding the sickle. But mah view was frustrated by the peaked facade of the Courthouse. There ah found the image of Justice, with her scales and blindfold, carved upon the facade above the front double doors. Seeking a better view, ah climbed upon the porch rail, and balancing there ah thought ah saw the glint of the angel’s upraised sickle before ah lost mah footing and everything blurred in mah new eye, rushing at me, turning black and then exploding into a flash of blinding light. The big eye met the ground, the telescope mercifully truncating in a three-move invagination – avoiding any damage to itself, but bouncing mah right eyeball off the frontal lobe of mah brain. ‘A good, strong telescope,’ ah thought, testing it with mah good eye. ‘But a better coign of vantage is required,’ ah mused, before mah head was ambushed by a clamouring rabble of thought, all shouts upon shouts of big ideas – brain mayhem – and ah limped back inside, and sat back down, recognizing the symptoms and waiting patiently for the racket to abate – for the voice of God with its firm, cool system – its system of solution – to rise above all the head-din. And before ah even became aware of His choir – the chanters – ah found mahself surveying the ceiling with mah eyes and thinking that if ah took a saw and cut a circular… tunnel… tunnet… no… turret, yes – a turret, a turret! And ah envisaged the whole concept in its entirety right there and then – the sloping ladder steps, twelve in all – the heavy water-tight trap-door – and the look-out itself, a one-man turret perched atop of the shack – the circular castellated parapet made of tin and thigh-high – the corrugated iron roof, like a Chinaman’s hat, supported by three metal poles and crowned by the official flag of Doghead. And ah saw the telescope clamped to its swivel-hipped tripod and – and ah had to smile at the wonder of it all. Yes. And ah turned mah attention to the mirror, or rather to the one reflected therein – that is to say He, the mad King of Doghead, clad in the bemedalled and outsized uniform of his sovereignty, armed with a wicked steel sickle, hair lank and greasy, his eyes wild as wheels and one, his right, spinning behind two fat purple lids, his arms clasped tight around his person, as he rocked in his chair, boots flying, gums gorged with green teeth, expelling with all his might a soundless belly-laugh – a laugh of shameless, unabashed insanity. And ah shuddered and darkened and sat with a scowl watching and hating that buggy bastard before me.

  The most practical aspect of the turret was its vantage point. If ah manned the scope and screwed a tight circle in a clockwise direction, this is what ah could see. The length of Maine. The doctor’s home. The Tabernacle. The gas pumps. The eastern versant. The mess on Glory Flats. The northern pass. The marshes. The swampland. The west side versant. The sugar crops. The graveyard. The storage sheds on Hooper’s Hill. The refinery. More crops. The school. Memorial Square. The marble angel above the Prophet’s sepulchre. Wiggam’s General Store, or at least the wishing well. And, completing the full circle, the house of Sardus Swift. The house of her. Beth. O and the playground in the square and the swing.

  Another practical purpose of the turret was that it allowed me to check the traps whenever ah got the notion and without leaving the Kingdom. This ensured that a snared animal would not have to wait till the end of the day before he was bagged and delivered of his crippling irons. Over the last two years, ah managed to catch eleven wild dogs in this fashion, without one of them dying in the trap itself. In their cages, maybe, but not in the traps.

  Like the wall, the turret served as a deterrent for any would-be tormenters, because it gave the whole area an atmosphere of security-consciousness – a general feeling of ‘Say the word, Mister, ah’m ready.’ And me in mah uniform, mah uniform of war and all, saying, ‘Try it, just fucken try it, friend!’ The general air, the tone, like it was saying to the outsiders – to them – to all the people, ‘Come on, kill me! Just try and fucken kill me! Kill me! Kill me! Kill me-e-e!’

  One day ah was asleep at mah post. Ah remember clearly it was the first day of spring, last year. Either that or the year before. It was certainly not the springtime of the year before that, to be sure, because at that time ah
was not alone, nor did ah have a post or a turret to dream in.

  Ah remember the dream. It was one of those atmospherical ones – a mere doodle of a dream, without a story or plot or narrative to speak of. Mah nap had been ambushed by a host of winged dolly-heads, golden-curled and cherry-lipped, with pale blue wings beneath their chins, swooping down at me and snapping and biting mah hair. And the more ah beat at them, the harder they came, chopping at mah poll and taking bloody locks of hair in their pearly teeth – off to their heavenly nest somewhere. Off to their heavenly nest somewhere. Off to their heavenly nest somewhere.

  Ah awoke with mah arms flailing about mah head, beating off those imaginary honey-haired harpies – the telescope spinning on its tripod like some berserk gatling gun and the whole turret rocking and shaking up there on the shack roof. The fact is ah was causing one hell of a hullabaloo for someone supposedly sleeping.

  Slowly it dawned on me that there was a counter-commotion in progress, down by the still. Ah had shifted the stillage – the boiler, the tubes and beakers – a few feet closer to the shack when ah dug the initial post holes and laid the supports for the wall, and now the whole apparatus sat a safe pace inside the confines of mah Kingdom. Or so ah had thought. Now, squirming through a small hole in the wall, ah could see the ratty rear end and broken-booted legs of what was clearly a hobo. The tail of his mud-caked greatcoat had become snagged momentarily on a finger of tin, and in the mad flurry of flight he managed to kick out one of the legs to the boiler-cradle. The whole apparatus collapsed with a crash of glass and a glug and a hissssss of escaping liquid over fire, and as the boiler rolled down to the wall its coiled hose pissed undistilled sugar-water into the bum’s beating boots. The puddle of inflammable hooch moved toward the burner as if inescapably drawn toward it and the flame, too, seemed like it was straining and stretching to touch the hooch. They met with a fierce roar and hot flames leapt into the air. Belching black smoke the fire roared triumphantly for a minute or so, ran out of juice, and died. By which time the hobo had wrenched himself through the wall in a fit of panic, leaving a scrap of dirty green felt, like a calling card, snagged in his wake.

  Ah spun around in mah tower in search of the yard-dogs ah had posted on ground duty, only to find them on the other side of the shack, copulating. They had only six legs and a stump between them. The passive partner, the unnerdog, was sprawled out like a sack of dung upon the damp earth, while her smaller but more intrepid pedicator humped and fumbled at her hind. With his front legs hooked around her huge rump and his single back leg springing somewhere between a hop and a stagger, the lame beast pumped piston-quick convulsions upon her inert back-end, never missing a beat as it staggered and stabbed blindly, swinging right to left, left to right, on one shaky leg. ‘Shit!’ ah thought, looking from hole to dogs, dogs to hole, a dilemma forming in mah mind. ‘Fix the hole or beat the dogs? Fix the hole or beat the dogs?’

  Later, mah arm exhausted and mah head full of howling, ah crossed the yard to the wall and surveyed the damage. One of the stills had been destroyed – a brew lost, grass scorched – and a tin panel in the wall had been bent upward and out. That too would need beating. Such was the damage to mah property. But how does one measure the severity of the blow to mah confidence in the Kingdom’s security. In strokes of the switch? In dog pain? Ah took up the hammer and even as ah brought it down to flatten the tin and close the hole, mah mind became possessed by alternative thoughts and ah threw the hammer away, leaving the gaping cavity as it was. Hands in pockets, head inclined, ah sauntered over to the porch steps and sat down.

  Ah looked at the ground. Ah looked at the sky. Ah looked to mah left, biting mah bottom lip, then looked to the right. Then, eyes welling, ah looked back at the sky and a deep sob broke upon that cloudless afternoon of the first day of spring, and ah cried there upon the porch steps – out of worry, out of lonesomeness.

  The new season’s insects hopped and burred and clicked, hovering over the purple bursts of thistle, over the periwinkle’s tender new blooms and the runt pod of the sweet pea. Bees beat and bounded about the first pale bells of the comfrey. Spring had broken, yet still mah head resounded with the winter’s wailing, and in mah mind a bitter wind began to blow as ah thought of the wretched interloper who had trespassed upon mah property with the intent to rob me, perhaps to kill me. Mah eyes slit and mah lips curled back off mah teeth as mah brain pickled in poison thoughts. In silence ah listened to the plotters and schemers that lurked in mah mind and to the low murmur of their treachery.

  Ah turned mah attention to the olive-leafed nocturne that crawled loose and heavy up the corroded gutter-spout and along the porch rail. Every contour of that creeper spelled meanness, ah swear to God. Fleshy, split-clefted leaves like a colony of black felt tongues bobbed sullen and toxic on thin sinuous stalks, curling up and around pillar, post and spout. Being at eye-level with the railing around which the vine was wound – with the dying sun splashing across the black dancing leaves – ah remember thinking that the vine looked as though it had been dipped in a tub of dull gun grease, like it was a gigantic gun-metal serpent or a weapon of death. And indeed it was a weapon of death as the chanters slowly came.

  Ah leapt to mah feet and began picking the creeper’s fleshy, spade-shaped leaves, stuffing them into the pockets of mah admiral’s jacket. Ah juiced them the same evening by mashing them between two smooth river rocks. Ah pressed the soppy pith to a dry pulp, and with the aid of a tin funnel channelled the milky sap into a small green-glass bottle, three-quarters filling it.

  The new spring moon looked naked, almost brazen in its fullness. It was the colour of mah angel’s skin, but with a hint of the mistreated in her unblinking majesty, her skin faintly darkened by pale grey bruises.

  Ah twisted the tiny cork from the neck of the miniature bottle and lifted it to mah nostrils, deeply inhaling its toxic vapour. Ah glimpsed the moon from out the corner of mah eye, and saw in that fleeting glance the top of the orb open as would a wound in flesh and spill a scarlet veil down her great naked face. ‘A whore-moon steeped in whore-blood,’ ah thought, and ah squeezed the image from mah eyes and let a minute pass. Mah head clear, ah looked again and found the moon as it had been – a gleaming orb of angel’s skin, glowing silver, punished.

  Under the cope of night ah kneeled at the still closest the wall and emptied the bottle of poison into the beaker of hooch. Ah squatted and rocked on mah heels and ah laughed with the idiot-moon – moon and mute noiseless against the clicking evil of that treacherous night.

  Two mornings later the beaker was gone. Ah checked the hole in the fence and found that it had been bent open even more. Ah wriggled through on hands and knees and found the hobo, sitting against the outer wall, quite dead. The tip of a pointed stick paired the wings of his chest, poking rudely through his blood-soaked shirt like a dripping dog’s dick. The beaker that had contained the fatal dose was empty but upright, locked in his death-grip. Obviously the bum had downed the liquor the moment he was free of the wall, swooned to the call of the toxin and braced his bulk on the pointed stick. The fool.

  ‘Well, look at you now!’ ah thought, as ah took him by the lapels of his greatcoat and slipped him off the stick. Ah shouldered his stiffed weight face-down on the dew-covered grass, then, crawling backwards, hauled him by the boots through the hole in the wall and into the confines of mah Kingdom. Ah returned to the outside and beat at the flattened grass with a leafy branch, slapping away his puke and his blood. Then ah removed the bloody stick and after close scrutiny, when it seemed that no tell-tale evidence remained, crawled back through the wall, shaking the branch behind me as ah went. Ah hammered the bent corner of tin flat and nailed the whole panel down, lacing it with barbed wire.

  The yard-dogs, their lesson well learned, hobbled over to the dun-coloured heap, strings of clear saliva bridging their bared teeth. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the dog,’ ah thought, as ah crossed the yard and entered the shed. Ah climbed up the steps, through the open tra
pdoor, and took mah place in the turret. Pulling in the telescope for short range, ah systematically surveyed the land in a two-mile radius. Ah found no witnesses. None.

  ‘Spare the rod and spoil the dog,’ ah found mah head repeating, as ah focused down on mah side of the fence and screwed in the scope in order to get a close-up of the hobo. But the damn dogs were there now fucking up the view. Ah looked at the blue sky and a bird with a crooked wing passed darkly across mah vista, turning everything black, and ah slumped forward, asleep. Bums’ heads on bloody sticks – No! – bums’ heads with rutting dogs’ dicks humped at mah day’s dreaming.

  These last two years, you know, they have been hard time spent. Not easy, flighty years, no, but hard time spent. You know what ah mean? No? Ah’m talking about the difference between time lived and time passed and time served. Unnerstand? Ah’m also talking about time taken, time borrowed and never given back. Ah’m talking about time downright thieved. O yes. Though not in sleep, no, but – ah guess, some kind of sleep. So these last two unsane years of mah life have been spent in tedious measurement of the minutes and the seconds and their ultimate passing. Or, rather, I have been time spent in the attempt to account for such time past spent or served or lent…

  These last two years, you know, have been hard time spent. Mah capacity for reminiscence – mah recall – well, these faculties, you know, once so sharp, so keen, have been – have been ruptured by yawning canyons of grey wool, like uncharted manholes down Memory Lane. Whole clues gone lost from the riddle. Days of fog. Of fear. Of blood and terrible laughter from the dark.

  Pray tell me. Is this news to you? Did ah tell – have ah told you? At some other moment? In some other mind? Have there been other occasions, ah ask you, now lost irretrievably in the webbed fabric of days gone by, in the sheer and spectral silks of yesterday? Tell me, ah want to know. Are these words ah speak now – are they already part of memory’s cape draped across the shoulders of mah time spent? If ah could fill in all the deadtime, how beautiful would memory’s cape really be? Would it lend a little razzmatazz to the shambolic passing of mah days remembered? Or would it be an unclean thing, this ragged uniform? Would it shed blood or skin like calendar leaves? Ah will ask you just one more time. So pay attention. Have ah said all this before?