by Hawkes, John
The gray truck chugged to a stop before Eve’s slimy pool, an unshielded dip of water in the waves of earth that, as far as they could see, appeared to be covered with palm leaves, broad, clay-veined shadows. Bohn climbed down, filled the canteen, tasted the water. The back of his head filled the window, one foot cocked on the mended running board. “Oil,” speaking over his shoulder, spitting, “they come this way all right.”
“We’ll set here and wait for them,” said Luke.
But once again they prowled forward, scattered abandoned nests and crossed small bodies of quicksand. Bohn pushed the truck further into the squeaking rushes.
Rum breath, saddle pants, and rank signs through the forest of needles; they did their hunting at night, dragged through roadless quagmires, and trundled under the dusky bluffs of Mistletoe. The black face hunters hooked rosined fingers in their belts, stared about bitterly for the undiscovered lairs. Suddenly, through the briars, they heard the coughing of another engine.
“There,” Bohn pulled the brake, “that’s them!”
“Switch on the lights.” And through the whorls of milky undergrowth they saw the troop of Red Devils on little horned motorcycles.
“You shoot,” cried Wade, “I ain’t going to shoot!”
“Load them guns.”
They fell from the cab and with ragged trouser bottoms, sealed grins, clamored over the sidings and dropped by Wade. Shells spilled under their feet.
“Hit them now,” Bohn pillowed the butt into his shoulder, drew down his head, “or never.”
They fired. From the parapet of the truck a tinkling cloud of shot landed among the vandal herd, rock salt into the buttocks of cornered apple thieves. In the headlights and streaming of the muskets, one motorcycle, as its rider fled, turned to flame under the little seat, reared, contorted into a snake embrace, and fell writhing in fire. A honking set up from the handless horn as the rubber bulb shrank in the heat.
Flat shells, smoke, recoil filled the truck, one side ablaze with the spitting triple battery. Bohn’s cheek was blue and red, a great wattle under the punishment of the gun, his eye steely down the barrel. In his corner, taking aim, Luke trained upon the dancing throng and with pinched mouth, bile rising from his stomach, held his fire.
“Shoot,” a voice at his ear, and he pulled the trigger.
The Devils limped under the red ball rain, suddenly pirouetted into the air or, taking one cleft step, dropped punctured and deflated, arms curling then flat on the ground. One jumped to his machine and Luke, again readying for the painful blow, looked full into the enormous reflecting goggles, the startled stare, and watched the dovetailed shot fan wide. Calmly he wiped the floating smoke from the muzzle.
Some mounted and in graceful frenzy drove head on toward the truck, beat their skinny jointless arms. Luke watched them coming, the Devils skimmed across his sights, kicked up their wheels. With blue powdered hands he gripped the carved wood stock, the hammered, tarnished silver, and he drank the waves of Bohn’s sweaty firing. He saw nothing but the nugget on the end of the gun, cross-eyed at the bead, watching it circle of its own will and apart from any target …
“Lead them. They fly too fast for dead on aim. Swing your arms.”
His eye crept along the hexagonal gun metal. There was no cotton in his ears, nothing to dull the slapping of air on either side as Bohn and the Sheriff discharged their weapons into the belly of the dam. The sweep before the truck was filled with leaves perforated and lightly touched by the swarms of buckshot. He crooked a finger on the sticky trigger. He reached out for ammunition. Then: “This is for one. And this is for another.”
He could feel the eruption under his nose before he squeezed; he fell back with the mistake, the searing, double dinosaurian footfall of the twin bores.
And suddenly, from the isolated battering truck, shrill and buoyant above the clumsiness of thick-kneed marksmen, there came that cool baying of the rising head, the call to kill, louder and singsong, faintly human after the flight of Devils, the nasal elated sounds of the cowboy’s western bark.
Yip, yip, yip.
CAP LEECH
now I’ll talk.
You’ve answered to me for having found him crouched with bare, folded feet, for having watched the thinly wrinkled, perforated breath of skin that was his throat—dry now, untouched, except for the soothing pressure of some tons of earth—for having spied on the wrappings, the colorless cloth, the complete expulsion of bodily fluids, the immobility of ten dangling fingers shoved like minnows into the shriveled ground.
One town further then: last seen by a river peering upward into his lumpy jaws.
Take me there.
• OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN HAWKES
THE BLOOD ORANGES
THE CANNIBAL
DEATH, SLEEP & THE TRAVELER
HUMORS OF BLOOD & SKIN:
A JOHN HAWKES READER
THE LIME TWIG
THE PASSION ARTIST
(LTD. ED.)
SECOND SKIN
TRAVESTY
VIRGINIE: HER TWO LIVES
(LTD. ED.)
COPYRIGHT 1951 • BY JOHN HAWKES
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 51-14554
ISBN: 978-0-811-22254-9 (e-book)
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Typography by Sophie Hawkes
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlln
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Ninth Printing
