Blood Sport Page 14

  19. Ratnose’s favorite color is blue, his favorite flower the nasturtium, and his favorite movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

  20. Though he occasionally sleeps in the nude, like when he’s up to some sort of hanky-panky with Twigan or his other “wrenches,” as he calls them, he usually sleeps in a red flannel nightshirt that was given to him as a Fandanay present many years ago by one of his old girl friends. On it she embroidered the word ratty in big curlicue letters and the figure of a pert, rascally rat with a turned-up nose.

  21. An avid student of Early Americana, Ratnose is presently at work on a volume of line drawings and appropriate text that he has tentatively titled The Urinals of Lewis & Clark. “In well-chosen words and elegant illustrations,” he says, “it both depicts and evokes the various shrubbery, tree stumps, wild flowers, anthills, snowdrifts, rivulets, trout streams, waterfalls ponds, lakes, swamps, gulches, wadis, canyons, slopes, and crests on and into which the members of the expedition voided their bladders during their epic journey to and from the Pacific Ocean. I see it as a handsomely bound, exquisitely printed monument to the luxury press, the sort of work that one finds on only the best of coffee tables. Perhaps it will attain a certain elitist standing among students of the Early West. I can envision a day not too far in the future when costly expeditions will be organized to retrace the route, with each urohistorophile pausing at every way station to wet down the sacred spot. I think it will be ‘must reading’ for anyone interested in the American Westering Experience.”

  22. On his own way West, he worked one summer for an undertaker in a small town on the Illinois prairies. There was a fellow in town named Bobby Farrell—a railroad man, young and romantic, who was engaged to the local librarian. One day Farrell was having a shave in the barbershop when he saw his intended walking by on the arm of a tall, handsome stranger. It was one of those scorching-hot Illinois midsummer days, and the couple paused under the barbershop awning in the shade while the young man solicitously fanned the girl’s brow. When Farrell had paid for his shave, he walked out of town into the cornfields and shot himself dead. (Here Ratnose always chuckles ironically.) Farrell needn’t have shot himself, for his fiancee’s escort was only her favorite cousin, on his first visit to the town. The girl, of course, was beside herself with grief and self-reproach. Ratnose arranged to short-circuit her tragedy, though. When the girl came into the mortuary alone one night to continue her morbid vigil, she noticed a strange, throbbing bulge in the corpse’s trousers. It was the same sort of bulge she’d noticed before when she and Farrell were sparking back in the library stacks on quiet days. She looked quickly at her loved one’s face, but it was as dead as it had been before, and the undertaker’s sloppy patchwork on his broken temple had not improved any in the meantime. But the bulge persisted, and finally she could resist her curiosity no longer. She unbuttoned Farrell’s fly. Surprise! His pecker leaped out and began waving in the air. The girl screamed and fled—ultimately as far as Danville, where she married a man in the meat-packing business and had five lovely children. Of course, Ratnose had stuck a wire through poor Farrell’s paraphernalia and was waggling it from a hiding spot under the bier. “If I hadn’t done that,” Ratnose liked to say, “the poor girl might have gone to her grave a spinster. As it was, when she finally collected herself, she probably reckoned that anyone who could be horny in his own casket would never have made a faithful husband.” Ratnose the Humanist!

  23. The reason he likes nasturtiums best is not because they sound “nasty,” but because the leaves and the unripe flowers have a sharp, peppery taste that goes well in salads.

  24. He once saw a man struck and killed on a city street by a runaway pie wagon. The pies flew all over the place, cracking on the cobblestones and leaking their goodies into the gutter. When someone in the band is killed, out hunting or on a raid, Ratnose says, “Yep, he was hit by the pie wagon.”

  25. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he identifies most closely with the old man, Howard, though he feels he is personally more like Fred C. Dobbs.

  26. Ratnose was married at one time to a woman named Evelyn Marie Oates, who didn’t know he was in the highwayman business. She thought he was a drummer for a Kansas City shoe company. From what Ratnose says about her, she was a thrifty, hardworking, churchgoing woman, big of bone and bosom, and pretty good in bed, too.

  At that time Ratnose and his pals were knocking over the small country banks and post offices that had sprung up on the plains in the wake of the buffalo and the frontier. It was easy work. One of the gang would take a room in a town that they had scouted, maybe even a job, and wait until the relative absence of lawmen and presence of cash—usually payrolls—hit the right balance. Then he would send a telegram in code to Ratnose: something clever like GERTIE EXPECTING MOMENTARILY STOP AWAITS YOUR RETURN WITH NO HARD FEELINGS. The gang, never more than six or seven men, badmashes all of them, would drift into town separately, arrange their getaway transportation, bust the bank or post office, hide out briefly in some safe cave or abandoned farm that the finger man had located, and then drift back home with no one the wiser.

  It was a profitable, low-risk enterprise, until one day Mrs. Evelyn Marie Oates Ratnose accidentally intercepted one of the Gertie telegrams. Figuring that her hubby had gotten some poor girl in trouble out there in Stroudsville or Bantam Bottom or Keokuk, or somewhere, she converted all of her egg money into a certified check for $104.73 and sent it to sheriff of the town in question along with a noble, self-reproachful night letter asking the lawman to give the money to poor, pregnant Gertie (she figured there couldn’t be more than one poor, pregnant Gertie in a town that size), explaining that her husband worked hard and traveled a lot and was to be excused his lust, particularly as she, Mrs. R., was a failure as a wife in that she obviously could not keep her husband satisfied.

  There being no poor, pregnant Gertie in that town, nor yet a pregnant Abigail, rich or poor, the sheriff quickly put two and two together and stationed four deputies with shotguns in the bank, behind the teller’s cage. When Ratnose and his boys came in, the shotguns cut them all down except Ratty and Hunk, both of whem escaped fearfully wounded. Ratnose later found out the details of the accidental betrayal when the sheriff, who had become a sot, turned up in Ratty’s saloon out in the Altyn Tagh a few years later. “Shot up like I was, I didn’t dare go home after the ambush,” he said. “And by the time I was healed, there would have been no explaining my absence to Evelyn Marie Oates. Still, it was good to learn that she had betrayed me out of a noble motive. That made me feel better about not sending for her to join me. I doubt she could have stood the wanton, low-down nature of my life in those days.

  I strung up the sheriff and skinned him out alive, then served him up for a year afterwards in the free lunch. I made souse out of his head, just the way you would a hog’s. Cut it off, shaved the whiskers and hair, removed the eyeballs, and boiled it down in a big pot of salty water. You have to strain the meat good to get the little bones like the ear bones out; then you run the boiled meat through a meat grinder and let it all jell in a bread pan, along with some peppercorns and an onion, some cornmeal, and a tablespoon of sage. Best damned head cheese I ever et, though the rest of him didn’t pickle too good. The jerky wasn’t too good neither, as I recall. Well, like they say, you oughtn’t to sneeze at free meat.

  But Evelyn Marie Oates, I missed her there for a while. She was a steady woman, and a warm one, always ready to blame herself for my failings and try to make up for it with love. I sure could have used her there during the months after the ambush when the buckshot was working its way out of me. Smarts like a son-of-a-bitch when one of them pellets is ready to pop, worse than any boil you ever had on your ass. Then, plunk, one day it falls down your pants leg and rolls away on the floor. I still got the scars from that little go-round, boys, yes I do.” And he shows them to us.

  27. He is afraid of lightning.

  So that’s all I can say for certain about Ratnose, in a fa
ctual way.

  35

  WINTER ENDED. Nothing gradual—it just ended. The snow went down like the float in a flush toilet. The sun came up like a blowtorch. The guy who named the season “spring” in our neck of the woods might have called it “splat” if he’d lived on the upper Hassayampa. Or “squt,” or “skluck.” All of the snow just simply melted overnight, it seemed, and went rumbling off downhill carrying trees and toads and houses and dead horses with it—a steady, burbling flow of something in between water and mud, with hair on its back. When the ice went out, I thought we had gone to war, it was that much like gunfire. For a while we loved it. No longer did we have to go out behind the tepee on snowshoes to take a shit, straddling like an Olympic gymnast to keep the turds out of our webbing. But pretty soon it was just as tough crapping in the mud: you didn’t know what you were stepping on when you stumbled away from the dump. Or even when you got back inside. The mud smelled like ripe compost.

  We did have some fun on the rivers, though. Fric and Frac had an old canoe stashed away in one of the sheds, and when the streams started to rise we broke it out, patched up the holes with strips of hide from an elephant’s ear, loaded the guns and the meat saws and a big burlap sack of rock salt into the middle of that rickety old birchbark, and off we went on a slaughter. We poured down those rivers like sixty, as Ratnose would say, with Fric in the bow and Frac at the stern paddle, while I sat on the salt bag in the middle with Hunky’s .243 in my hands, whooping us over the haystacks and blasting every horned critter we found stuck in the mud. We ran down through a tumble of deadies the likes of which I never had seen: giant oak trees rolling like rhinos in the mucky flow, tossing their roots at us from every angle, groaning and cracking, kicking up the sodden corpses of moose and aurochs—massive blue hulks with their eyes staring blue under the chocolate milk of the runoff, horns snatching at the birchbark as their heads and limp hooves lolled free, neck-broken, purple tongues; a scum of drowned chipmunks and marmots and rats bobbing bloated in the froth, while we ripped past, screeching and cursing. There were big brown chunks of rotten ice in the river, heaving like potato fields. And all the while the spring, splat, squt, skluck sun burning down through the webwork of the riverside trees.

  We killed a ton of game every day, snagged some of it with our grappling hooks, and butchered out and salted down only a fraction of that amount at best. Yet in the two weeks of the runoff, we replaced all the meat that had been eaten by the band during the winter. It wasn’t fat meat—not like the marbled red steaks and backstraps of the animals we killed in the late fall, after the rut, when they were building meat for the winter —but it was meat, and we were meat-eaters, and we liked it. I know it sounds cruel to you who are sportsmen, the way we killed those bawling, helpless cattle stuck up to their withers in the mud, but I, by God (or Ratnose), enjoyed it; we rode that rotten brown wave at our own peril and unthinking of our own peril, and shot those stupid fuckers where they stood, mired down in their own blind panic.

  You might wonder how we dragged all that meat back to camp. Well, that was part of Ratty’s genius. He had built the camp in the middle of a big horseshoe bend of the river, a bend that ran easily fifteen miles through the foothills. We put in on the uphill side of the river, about a stone’s throw from the sheds, and ended up only a half mile away on the downhill side. When we got in with our meat at the end of the day, we just whooped —if they hadn’t heard us coming already, which was easy enough, what with our shooting and singing and screeching— and the old ladies dragged the meat up to the smokehouse. God, how we preened ourselves on those returns! Fric balanced his paddle on the end of his nose and danced a jig step up the hill. Frac pole-vaulted over the stumps and paused from time to time and pretended to jerk off. I did gunfighter twirls with the .243 and made violent faces, followed by heavy winks to show I was just kidding. You never knew who might like to shoot you in that camp.

  Twigan was always there with a steaming pot of mint-flavored crait when we arrived, and although she tried to make it seem that she was sharing it equally among us three great hunters, I knew right from the start that she meant the gesture for me. I think Ratnose knew as well. One evening he walked beside me up the hill, our boots shlurping in cadence through the mud, and he put a hand on my shoulder. I could already feel the crait working—a slow, steady spreading of my sight and touch and hearing. The light was lime yellow; the time was tart and humming. Ratty’s hand was the same.

  “Ah, Runner,” he said as we stopped. “Do you really appreciate this season, my boy? You and your buddies are so caught up in the running of water and the killing of meat that I fear you fail to appreciate the subtleties of spring.”

  I looked at him, and his one mad eye was just as playful as ever.

  “The lowly crocus thrusting its pallid head through the newly liberated earth; the hillside trees stretching their limbs and yawning their buds as if in a slow awakening from winter’s restful sleep; the stumbling bear cub emerging for his or her first glimpse of light, first taste of Father Suns heady brew: do none of these events strike a sympathetic note within your murderous breast?”

  I looked at him more closely, and he cut a fart.

  “And the geese—”

  A skein of honkers was moving overhead at that very moment, riding high on the last of the sunlight. They were working toward a landing, and as the family groups reoriented themselves within the flight, they broke the V into an aerial alphabet far more complex than any I had ever memorized. Their yelps came down to us like those of wolves.

  “—the hounds of heaven,” continued Ratty: “do they not move you, Runner? Do not their constancies, their monogamies, their exquisite navigations—do not these loud miracles arouse your interest in the Godhead?

  “No,” he said, slapping my shoulder. “They intrigue you not in the least. Your interest resides in blood and fucking, in taking from the weak and humble, in defiling the crocus and slaughtering the bear cub. In humping the helpless women of my tribe. In riding that dirty goddam motorcycle of yours all over this lovely countryside. The only goose you understand is a tactile gesture.”

  By now the crait was all the way through me; it was pouring out of my thumbs. I knew what Ratnose had said, but I didn’t know what he was saying—it was that different a thing. I sat down on a pine stump and unloaded the .243, testing the cartridges for grease before I pocketed them. Then the sound of the lever, clicking out the rounds, merged with the barking of the geese overhead. I looked up at them, shifting and sliding into their ever-changing alphabet that wasn’t quite an alphabet, that had none of the easy, here-we-go-to-wisdom qualities of the alphabet. Goose. Mother Goose. Ratty had said something about a goose.

  “The geese are flying calligraphy,” I said finally.

  “What do you mean by that, Runner?”

  “I don’t know. Just that they’re flying a bunch of ideas that I can’t read, I guess.”

  “But you’d like to kill them, and then go off somewhere and get laid, right?”

  “I suppose so, but I don’t know if the one thing has anything to do with the other.”

  “You’re right it doesn’t,” Ratnose yelled. “You’re damned right it doesn’t! Flying calligraphy, my ass! You naughty boy. Study nature and learn!”

  With that he stumped off up the hill, glaring back at me from time to time with that peculiar monocular menace of his. But none of it really reached me, really penetrated my high. I was spread out on a wave of crait that was as smooth and brown and bulging as the river, and meanwhile the geese went to bed.

  I don’t know how long I meditated there, and I don’t even know if you could call it meditation. Finally, perhaps foolishly, I slung the .243 on my shoulder and hiked back up into camp. The fires were glowing, spitting a few sparks, hissing at me like red-and-yellow geese. Blondie stood before our tepee, rolling her eyes and making suck-off sounds with her smiling, toothless mouth. I walked into the tepee, giving her a hard shoulder that sent her weeping in
to the dark, and picked up a blanket. Then I walked over to the shed where I had parked the Husky. I kicked it alive and blatted it for a while—harsh and angry, Yd guess you might say. Twigan came out of the shadows, as I knew she would. The bike was warm now, so I spread the blanket over her shoulders and reloaded the .243, slowly, keeping my eyes away from Ratty’s cave all the while, trusting the skin on my backbone. Then I stuck the carbine into the boot and, feeling Twigan’s hands on my ribs and her weight on the pillion, I dropped the bike into low and eased on out of there. Just as I reached the last fire, I tipped her up into second and came down hard on the throttle—that wicked yeah downward back-turning thrust of skin on rubber that lifts your front wheel into the sky and brings your back muscles up into your skull— and we blew mud all over that campfire.