Blood Sport Read online

  But Fric and I took the old man seriously. Fric questioned him in pidgin Mandarin and the old man chattered away for half an hour, drawing a cramped little map for us on the back of a cigarette paper, moaning from time to time, imitating gunshots with a high, hissing clack like Chinese firecrackers. Fric listened gravely, then offered the old man a handful of coins. The old man refused them gently and chattered something in a pleading tone. Fric shook his head.

  “Let’s go,” he said. We walked back up the crooked street to the Costive Cowpoke. “The old guy says there’s a man out there who kills anyone who stops at the dump,” Fric told us. “Some of the locals think he’s the ghost of World War Two. He wears old army fatigues and combat boots and carries a BAR. He is very righteous, like the Longnoses were during the Big War. Others say he is Tilkut, the Bear God, cousin of the Great Crow who lives north of the mountains and spreads mischief and chaos down here by means of his animal agents. They’ve seen him shuffling through the dump as big as a bear, and very shaggy. Last week he ambushed a party of Chinese merchants who stopped to poke through the dump and killed them to a man. Some of them he mutilated in a very peculiar fashion, though the old man wouldn’t tell me how. When I asked him, all he said was ‘Ngaa!’ and pointed to the mountains. Anyway, I don’t think we ought to go out there. It’s probably some nut who’s living off the old C-rations and wearing the old clothes they left there. No telling what he’s up to.”

  I had a pretty good idea who he was and what he was up to, but I didn’t dare tell Fric and Frac. It was probably my old man, holed up at the dump and killing anyone who came through in hopes that he would sooner or later nail Ratnose. He’d given me up for dead by now and was out for revenge.

  “Ah, it’s just a crock of that old Hassayampan bullshit,” said Frac. “They’re all yellow up here, in more ways than one. Except Ratty, and he’s not really a Hassayampan. Look at Hunk and Lump. There’s places in the mountains that they wouldn’t go for all the hemp in Hymarind—claim there’s devils in there, shaped like rocks or birds or waterfalls. I go into those places all the time and nothing ever bothers me. If anyone killed those Chinks, it was probably the old man himself, that thieving bastard—he was a paymaster in Chiang’s army, that’s what Hal says—or else some of those Mao Mao who come up here every now and then for ammo.”

  When we got back to the Costive Cowpoke, Hal was too drunk to make much sense. He’d finally managed a good hearty crap and was celebrating with a bottle of Old Overholt that he’d taken off the body of a dead C-55 pilot in the winter of 1944 and had been saving for a special celebration. Fric and I were dead beat, so we bedded down—Fric with Gisela and I with little Meiko. Frac stayed at the bar, drinking with Carol and Hal. The last thing I heard as I dropped off to sleep was the four of them singing, “Fuck ’em all, fuck ’em all, The long and the short and the tall . . .”

  When I woke up in the morning, there was a note from Frac saying he’d gone down to the dump to get my gasoline and that we should be ready to ride out for the mountains by noon. “I took along Hal’s Tommy gun,” he added at the end of the note, “so don’t worry about no Bear or Ghost Warrior gobbling me up.”

  38

  A STORM WAS BREWING over the mountains as we rode down to the dump. Black clouds boiling over the dirty-gray peaks, and those long, bowling-ball rumbles of distant thunder that drowned out the sound of our gallop. Dust devils sucking up the desert and spitting it dry in our eyes. Even the wildlife seemed subdued in the aura of impending wrath that preceded the storm. We passed a small herd of what looked like onagers, huddled head down in a shallow gully, their tails snapping like whips in the brown wind. A ragtag string of ravens blew over us, helpless against the gusts, like the broken tops of so many black umbrellas, croaking with despair at their inability to navigate in this weather. They sounded just like Hal, who had come with us and was moaning all the while about his hangover and our stupidity in not telling him the night before when he was still sober that we wanted to go to the dump.

  “I could of told you there was a madman down there,” he kept saying. “One of those goddam killer-saints that wanders in here ever now and then; maybe even that nut who was looking for you; but no—oooh, my head!—no, you gotta go and right away start messin with my girls and get me drunk. Oh, shit, my haid just opened up and swallowed my nose. Oh, you dang dumb cork-soakin’ kids that keep comm around here, shit . . .”and on and on like that while we whipped the ponies on down the dusty, almost invisible caravan track that led past the dump a long weary way into China proper.

  By the time we got to the dump, the storm was nearly on us. The light was eerie—that greenish-black gloom that is darker than night, and scarier too, what with the wind moaning through the picked carcasses of the old World War II trucks that stood there on their rusty tire rims with their hoods flapping over the empty holes where their motors had been before the local people had stolen them for idols in their churches, and the empty Quonsets creaking under the wind’s fist, some of them giving off hollow howls where the wind blew flush past their open doors like a monster jug being puffed on by a giant, and the clatter of trash banging against the big, near-empty gasoline tanks, flaked and scarred by rust and time—the drums of a ghostly sky band. Frac’s pony was tied to a dead bulldozer over near the guardhouse. The horse rolled its eyes and reared against the reins, and when we got close we could hear its sniveling over the rumble of the wind, but there was no sign of Frac.

  There were two full jerry cans of gasoline near the pony, so Frac had gotten that far with it, anyway. I lashed the cans over the pommel of my saddle while Hal and Fric checked around the big tanks for sign. They moved very cautiously, with their rifles up and ready, their backs against the pitted steel, and sometimes I lost them in the clouds of dust that were getting thicker by the minute. If someone had taken a shot at them right then, even with a big automatic weapon, I wouldn’t have heard it over the roar of the wind. But they came back finally, white-faced and solemn.

  “Nothing,” said Fric. “But anyway, the wind would have blown out his tracks even if he was only a minute ahead of us.”

  “Maybe he’s in one of the Quonsets,” said Hal.. “He could be scrounging around in there for goodies, or something.”

  “I guess we’ll have to look,” Fric said.

  We scouted the huts slowly, on tiptoe, each man taking a turn at poking his head in through the door while the others covered him. In the second hut, we found a crate of grenades —the frag models—and stuck some in our pockets just in case. The fourth hut had been a radio shack. It was creepy in there, with the old pinup posters smiling lewdly down on us from the walls, the girls looking incredibly faded and ancient except for their bright wet lipstick smirks that I suddenly realized meant the promise of blow jobs in an era that had never even said “fuck” out loud. And what did that cryptic phrase mean—KILROY WAS HERE?

  It stayed in my mind as we stalked the other Quonsets, taking on the slow cadence of our steps: Kill-roy, kill-roy, kill-roy—then changing: pull-toy, pull-toy, pull-toy—then again: till-cut, till- cut, till-cut. You know how your head will do you when you’re concentrating on your body: it will change things around in there, play a little crossword game with everything you know, or don’t realize you know. Songs and prayers get mixed up, and somewhere along the way the mix will give you a spike of personal truth, for the moment.

  Outside the hut that used to be the barracks, we found the bodies of the Chinese traders. They were still badly bloated, and the rats had been at work on them. The crows too, judging by their eyes. The wind kept the smell down, but I caught a whiff or two anyway. There were eight of them. Over near the road, their horses huddled in the lee of a wind-bent outhouse, nickering and stomping.

  “The Leaning Tower of Pissed-Off,” said Fric, yelling to be heard over the wind. I looked back toward town and could see the first line of rain just about to reach it—a shimmering white line that dropped from the gunmetal sky like a set of te
eth twenty miles away. Then, it being my turn, I looked into the Quonset hut. Frac was in there.

  At first I didn’t see him. Then I saw him all too clearly. He was lashed hand and foot to the empty frame of a bunk, and from the way his head was bent I knew he was dead. There was a large pool of blood under his head, and a thick string of blood hung from the side of his mouth.

  “Okay,” I told the others. “Here he is.”

  We walked up slowly and checked him out. All of his weapons were gone, even his belt knife. His eyes looked up and backwards toward the empty window, where the cobwebs were blowing, victims of the wind. There were no wounds visible through his clothing. Hal stuck a finger in Frac’s mouth, which was full of blood.

  “Still warm,” Hal said. “And his tongue has been cut out.”

  Fric retched and turned away. Hal tilted Frac’s head to the side and poured out the blood that remained in his mouth. I could see the stump in there beyond the gleam of Frac’s nice white modern teeth.

  Then Fric retched again, louder, and grabbed my shoulder. He pointed to the opposite wall. Leaning against it was an ultralight fishing rod that I recognized immediately, and at the end of the line, dangling from a shiny sharp Mustad 4/0 hook, was Fracs tongue. Fric stumped back against the wall and sat down, retching and gagging on bile—we hadn’t had any breakfast.

  “Son of a bitch!” said Hal. “I haven’t seen that since the War. The Jap Marines used to do that to their prisoners: stake ’em out and put a fishhook through their tongues, then just tug out the answers very gently. And when the guy had finally told ’em all he knew, they cut out his tongue and used it for bait.”

  We stood there for a long minute, thinking about that. Fric was sobbing now. Hal pulled out a hip flask and took a pull that gurgled in his throat. He passed it to me and I swallowed a mouthful of what might have been bourbon, though I wasn’t tasting too sensitively right then. Suddenly I realized that the wind had died—the storm must have been about to hit—and the roar of the ghostly compound was gone. The silence dragged our minds away from the horror and turned us outward again. A crow began barking outside, not too far away, with those urgent doglike yaps they use to alert one another. And I remembered that my father was very good at birdcalls.

  “Shit!” yelled Hal suddenly, his eyes wide with panic. “I’m getting out of here.”

  He ran for the door, but the moment he stepped outside he flew sideways, and I heard the pounding of an automatic rifle. Then silence.

  “What is it?” Fric asked. He had stopped crying and now looked quite alert.

  “Hal got shot.”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  The crow call was repeated. It was strange: I knew his voice, even when it was filtered through the language of a wild animal. He had tried to teach me the various crow calls, but my voice was too high. He liked to call the crows in, shoot the scouts, and then wait and laugh while the whole flock swirled around overhead, wondering what had happened to their lookouts. When he was a kid, he told me, he killed crows by the hundreds, but as he got older, he grew to like them so much that he couldn’t bring himself to shoot. “They’re a lot like us,” he would say: “carrion eaters, group thinkers, too damned smart for their own good.” But maybe my voice wasn’t too high anymore. Maybe I could signal him and he would stop killing us.

  I was about to give the yell when the storm hit—in full strength now, with horizontal sheets of rain and a wind that made the earlier one feel like a summer breeze. The lightning smacked down on us like the wrath of the devil. There was a stutter underneath it, and we saw a hot, orange flash much slower than lightning that ballooned outside the window from the direction of the big gasoline tanks.

  “Shit,” yelled Fric, “he’s fired the gas tanks. He’ll cook us in a minute!”

  We ran for the door, but I got there first and held Fric back. I fumbled a grenade out of my pocket and threw it sputtering off into the glare in the direction where the shots had come from. When it blew, I ran, feeling the fire’s heat like a slap in the face, vaulting Hal’s body and keeping low until I had the Quonsets covering me. Fric was at my heels—I could hear his boots splatting the mud, or maybe that was just bullets—and the herd of Chinese horses was moving with us, apparently taking us for other, wiser horses. Through the gaps between the Quonsets I thought I could see a large, lightning-lit figure stalking us, bulbous and hairy, at about a hundred yards’ distance. The Bear God. Till-Cut. I slipped and fell over a ditch, but on the other side I found my rifle at my shoulder and snapped off a shot in the direction where I’d seen him last. Kill-Roy!

  Under the chuffing of the wind and fire I thought I heard the crow call. I tried to answer it, but I had mud in my throat. Then the lightning flashed once again. Backlit he stood there, close and huge, bristling, with the bear’s ears like horns on his head. The shadow of his moustache, the shine of his teeth. Fire all around him, front and back. Cawing at us, haw haw, haw haw, and the long shiny BAR coming up to his shoulder. I knew he was strong enough to shoot that weapon offhand—any weapon. He would boast about how he had shot the big 16-inch guns when he was a kid in the Navy. He still knew all the drill, could do the gun captain’s ballet; they had shot those monster naval rifles in twenty-seven seconds, he told me time and again. And then the BAR cut loose, very loud that close, and with bits of wadding sparking around the blast, and in the muzzle flash I could see his eyes, I thought, full of rage and joy behind the fire, and I wanted to yell at him that I was his son, spare me!—but instead I was pulling the ring on another grenade, and my arm came across, and he must have seen the fire in the fuse, because when the blast came he wasn’t there. Or maybe he saw my arm swing. But then I was up behind the next hut, and around it, and onto my pony, riding. We rode out low, with the Chinese horses all around us. That’s the only way I can explain how he missed us.

  39

  EXCEPT THAT HE WAS TOO GOOD a shot to have missed us, even in that bad light. And he was clever, now that he had slipped into madness and murder. Why kill us when he could trail us back to Ratnose’s camp? Even if Frac had told him where the camp was, it would be easier and quicker to trail us back and then kill us when we got there. I didn’t think of that right then, though. I was too spooked, shaking with fear as we pounded the horses back up the road to Hymarind, with the fire roaring behind us and Fric’s pony ahead of me throwing clumps of mud into my face so that I had to ride blind with my cheek against the horse’s wet, lathery, sweet-smelling neck. But it occurred to me later while we were standing around in Hal’s saloon, telling the weeping girls about the Bear God’s ambush. Fric by now had recovered from his case of the horrors and was all bluster, swearing vengeance and showing his teeth in wicked snarls. He’d get together a posse, by God, just as soon as the storm was over, by Christ, and then they’d by Jesus ride down there and slaughter that yellow-bellied mammy-jammin’ bushwacker—no, they’d take him alive and string him up and then skin him out real slow; they’d cut off little bits of him and cook the bits over a fire and make him eat them . . .

  “Listen,” I told him finally, “you know you’re not going to get any posse together in this town; they’re all too spooked of that guy. And you know that Frac must have told him where Ratty’s camp is. And if we don’t get moving right now, he’s going to be somewhere along the trail back, waiting to ambush us again. Let’s haul ass.”

  A little flicker of the fear came back into his eyes.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  We had to kick the whimpering whores away from our stirrups to get out of there, with Fric promising to bring back Ratnose and wreak revenge, and them not listening but only begging us to stay and protect them from Tilkut, but finally we were out of town and riding. The air after the storm was light and sweet, and the country smelled fresh, tangy with mud and rivulets. A thick, yellow-brown column of smoke rose straight into the sky, miles high, from the burning dump. It remained in sight over our shoulders until nightfall. We rode hard. There was new
snow at the higher elevations, and we cursed it because it would give Tilkut an easy track to follow, but we stuck to the streambeds as much as possible, even though the heavy runoff threatened to spill our ponies. We rode all that night as well, eating jerky and cold rice out of our saddlebags, zigzagging to make best use of the bare ground and throw Tilkut off the trail. At least, we were making him work.

  Toward dawn I must have fallen asleep in the saddle, because the next thing I knew I was waist-deep in the stream we’d been following, spluttering and cursing while my horse tried gamely to kick my head off. When I remounted, Fric took the reins and led my pony at a walk while I alternately shivered and dozed. Shortly after dawn, I did the same for him. By now we were into the timber, and the chances of ambush were that much greater. But we never saw the Bear God, nor did we cut his track, which was good because it meant he might not be ahead of us, lying up on some boulder with that damned BAR of his, waiting to cut us down. I could imagine him, though, humping along on a ratty pinto pony with that bearskin draped over his head and shoulders, the bears withered muzzle acting as a sun visor, his automatic rifle across the pommel and the Luger stuck in the back of his waistband, the way he always liked to carry it because a Mexican narc and gunfighter he once knew had carried his piece that way, and I could see his eyes under the bears muzzle, green and mean like when he was going to spank me, only this time he meant to kill my ass. . . .

  A deer crashed out of a willow brake ahead of us, and we both nearly died of heart failure. Then we saw her flag—a big, barren doe—as she skipped up the ridge through the snowdrifts and disappeared on the far side. We were both about to say something in relief—Fric had a silly grin on his face now—when we heard a shot from the direction in which the doe had disappeared. Just a hollow clap it was, gunfire doesn’t carry far in these mountains.