The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

  Towards mid morning, Tom saw a burned-out car beside the road. He slowed to assess whether this was a recent happening; but then, seeing the rust streaking the buckled panels, and the interior choked with sand, he accelerated.

  Soon there were other abandoned vehicles. Some were more or less intact, with perhaps only a rumpled fender, starred windows and a few bullet holes in their side panels. Others had been wrung-out by awesome forces, their bodywork twisted and crushed, as if a giant child, tiring of his toy cars, had had a destructive tantrum. There were SUVs, pick-ups – even the trucks used by the paramilitary police. Every sort of vehicle Tom had seen on Route I was present in this edge city of hulks. Further away from the road, he saw a gasoline tanker, its tank opened out in petals of blackened metal.

  Prentice, normally keen to sermonize on the basis of this or that wayside attraction, remained silent, rocking and rolling as the car bucketed along.

  Then there came a quite ordinary sedan – ornamental tissue box still intact on its rear-window shelf – that was still alight. Vivid flames licked the mashed hood, dense billows of black smoke clotted in the air. Prentice roused himself a little as they drove by – then relapsed into torpor. Not knowing what else to do, Tom kept driving.

  But a few miles further on he had to stop.

  The first indication that something was seriously amiss came when a clutch of helicopters roared low over the car. These were single-rotor aircraft with bulbous plastic canopies. Even though they were gone in moments, Tom saw the missiles mounted beneath them. Where the helicopters disappeared over the horizon a column of smoke was visible; although whether this had been caused by them or was an effect they were seeking to dispel, he could not be certain.

  Tom slowed to a crawl as two cops approached the SUV. With fluorescent batons, they directed him into a lane formed by striped cones. They also held signs. One read NO WEAPONS, the other GET IN LANE. Beyond the cops, stubbed out in a crater by an inky finger of smoke, was McGowan’s road-train.

  Further off on the bled, the helicopters stood, shiny visages facing one another in a conversational grouping. Slow- turning rotors idly chit-chatted, as if these were bored guests at a party, the centre-piece of which was this enormous barbecue.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Prentice asked the sergeant who came up to his window.

  Tom thought this a deranged denial of the obvious, but the Tugganarong took it in his stride.

  ‘Bing-bong buggers stuck another IED under the highway, sir,’ he said, taking the sheaf of papers Prentice handed him. ‘No worries, Aval mob, they’ll be way over there by now, yeah.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, then tucked his baton between his thick thighs so he could check through the permits and the laissez-passers.

  ‘Are those your rifles on the back rack, sir?’ asked the second cop, who had come up to the driver’s window.

  ‘Uh, yeah. I mean, of course they are,’ Tom replied nervily.

  ‘Have to take ’em off of you, I’m afraid. Purely routine safety – and your ammo. I’ll hand ’em back to you a half-klick on, where you rejoin the road, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. I guess.’

  Tom handed over the boxes of ammunition, then waited while the cop took the green-sleeved Galils from the rack. When the sergeant handed Prentice their papers and rapped on the roof, Tom pulled away.

  The lane of cones took them on a neat diversion across the bled, circumventing the burning road-train. Prentice made to light a cigarette, but Tom snapped at him, ‘Are you fucking crazy, man! Why d’you think they took the guns? There’s spilled fuel all over the place.’

  Globs, dashes and even pools of thick black viscosity smirched the sable. One of McGowan’s semi-trailers had been thrown up in the air by the explosion, and come down on top of the other. Both were burning. From a hundred yards off Tom could feel the angry pulse of the flames. Flames that licked the ruptured faces of the giant Neapolitan mamas. Crates smashed by the blast had disgorged their contents: the doughy discs lay scattered on the ground – fast-food fallout, cooked to a turn. The aroma of melting mozzarella mixed weirdly with the gas fumes.

  The rig, however, was hardly damaged. It stood on the crown of the highway, only a few detached slats of fairing to suggest that it wasn’t idling for a moment before roaring away. There were these, and there was also McGowan’s corpse, which, as the car bumped back on to the road, they both got a good sight of.

  The driver’s face was composed, his posture relaxed, his hair smoothed against his rounded head – all of which was strange, because McGowan was tilted backwards out of the window of the cab, as if he had attempted a Fosbury Flop to safety at the very moment of his expiry. His chest had also been liquidized, so that through each hole in his string undershirt squirmed a worm of tomato purée.

  The cone lane terminated in a makeshift roadblock. Cops lounged about, accessorized by their carbines and flying helmets. The sergeant drove up in a jeep and offloaded Tom’s rifles.

  Tom got out of the car and went to help him clip them to the rack. ‘Is there any . . .’ He decided to change tack: ‘What would your assessment be of the security situation between here and the Tontines, officer?’

  Tom hoped this sounded authoritative – brave, even. The sergeant didn’t seem taken in; he looked sceptically at Tom.

  ‘No worries out here, sir,’ he said. ‘Insurgents’ll only hit fuel or other supply trains – stuff headed for the bauxite mines at Kellippi. This is a basic law and order problem for us – no big drama. And no offence, but these crims couldn’t give a rat’s arse about a couple of stray Anglos.’

  ‘None taken,’ Tom muttered.

  ‘Mind you,’ the sergeant continued, ‘that only goes so far as the next thou’ clicks – after that you’ll be in striking distance of the Tontines.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Anything can go down there. Bloody anything.’

  Tom laughed as well, in a manner that he hoped suggested shrewd understanding.

  The sergeant patted one of the rifles. ‘Galil,’ he remarked. ‘Nice piece. Bing-bongs down south favour them – we’ve got a few too. Two-stage trigger’s a bit of a non-starter; still, whack in a box, put it on fully auto’, and you can take out those black bastards before they get in too close, yeah.’

  The sergeant flicked a finger to his shiny origami cap and sidled away to join his colleagues at the checkpoint. Then he turned back. ‘ ’Course, you’ve gotta handgun, yeah?’

  ‘You heard that, did you?’ Tom asked Prentice, after they had been waved through, and the SUV was rollicking once more along Route 1.

  ‘Oh, yes, old chap,’ he replied.

  Struck by Prentice’s self-satisfied tone, Tom glanced over at him. He was holding an automatic pistol. Agitated, Tom looked at the highway, then back at the gun. It appeared quite alien in Prentice’s soft hand: a space-blaster hefted by a clerk. The automatic had crude, functional lines: rectangular barrel, larger rectangle for the stock. His yellow finger rubbed the trigger guard, then poked inside it and flicked the steel curlicue of the trigger itself.

  ‘I hope that fucking thing is on safety,’ Tom snapped.

  ‘ ’Course it is, old chap.’ Prentice spoke with dreamy self-absorption. ‘D’you take me for a moron?’

  ‘Where’d you get it from? D’you know how to use it properly? Why didn’t you tell me you had it? You could’ve gotten us arrested.’

  These remarks ricocheted in the smoky interior of the car. As Tom understood it, handguns were an anathema to Prentice’s countrymen; it hardly seemed likely that he could handle one competently.

  Prentice went on titivating the trigger, and when he replied it was with an air of erotic reverie. ‘Honestly, Brodzin-ski, I didn’t take you for such a nervous ninny. There’s nothing illegal about carrying a handgun in these parts – anyone with any sense does. If you weren’t quite so wrapped up in yourself, you’d’ve taken the trouble to assess the security situation a little more thoroughly.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ Tom spat. �
�Do you know how to use the thing?’

  ‘It’s my wife’s cousin’s.’ Prentice raised the automatic to his furtive mouth; for a second it seemed he was going to kiss the barrel. ‘I brought it with me from down south; even in Vance you never know when some buck bing-bong might run amok, try and rape your lady.’

  Tom yanked the wheel and jabbed the brake pedal. The SUV slewed, then jumped over the ridge of earth at the side of the highway. They came to a halt. Tom rounded on Prentice: ‘Do you know how to use it? By which I mean to say: have you ever actually fired that gun, you fucking poseur?’

  For moments there was shocked silence, then the flies, which had been hypnotized by the thrust of glassy hardness against their hairy feet, began to flit.

  Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Eurgh-ahem, well, now you come to mention it, Brodzinski, no, I haven’t fired it, as such, although I do have a perfectly good understanding of it as a weapon. It’s a Browning BDM. It has a fifteen-shot magazine, nine-millimetre calibre. This toggle here’ – he fiddled with the stock – ‘switches it to “revolver mode” . . .’

  Tom wasn’t listening. He slammed the SUV into gear, and it scrambled back on to the blacktop. He didn’t speak until they were humming along.

  ‘Put it away, Prentice,’ he said. ‘Put it away. Till we know how to fire the thing it’s just another fucking liability. Put it away, and then . . .’ he said, groping for conciliation, ‘when we’ve put some distance between us and that, um, incident, we’ll find a quiet spot where we can practise with it and the rifles. OK by you?’

  Prentice signalled his assent by withdrawing the magazine from the automatic. With great deliberation he placed it, together with the gun, in the glove compartment.

  * * *

  The SUV hummed on across the interminable desert. The heat spiralled; the men sweated. Prentice rolled down his fly screen. The landscape, which, since they left the road stop that morning had been intimidatingly featureless, now began imperceptibly to alter, slowly becoming threatening, and then downright scary.

  The wavering silhouettes of the mesas on the far northern horizon declined. The bled, absorbing their bulk, buckled and then broke up. Deep furrows appeared in its surface, gathered, then consolidated into severe wadis. The colours went from bright to lurid: rusty reds flared scarlet, subtle sable sands became wastes of pus-yellow dirt. The salt pans’ mineral glitter intensified, bluer and bluer.

  With each cigarette Prentice lit, Tom felt his own desire for nicotine rise up his gorge. He swallowed it down with pride. In his self-denial lay his strength, his probity, his – Tom blanched at the phrase, yet embraced it – moral fibre.

  The glare lasered through Tom’s Polaroid sunglasses. He could feel his skin tighten, his blistering lips flake. He resolved to buy better glasses, more sun block and moisturizer, as soon as they reached a decent drugstore.

  At least the badlands hid the burned-out vehicles. Route 1 maintained its arrow-straight westerly flight, over embankments and through cuttings, while the car carrion was hidden in hollows: ragged metal obscured by ragged rocks, its paintwork camouflaged by the desert’s own deceptive bends. Tom knew that they would never see the ragged rascals coming.

  They drove fast for fifty, a hundred, three hundred klicks. It was well after noon, when Prentice – adopting the wheedling, infantile tone that made his requests sound like ‘Are we nearly there, yet?’ – broke the silence. ‘Um,’ he ventured. ‘I’m awfully peckish, Brodzinski, what say we pull over for a picnic?’

  ‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘Why not? Picnic and pot-shots, eh, Prentice? Just the ticket, old boy.’

  They made camp in the bed of a deep, angular wadi that Tom had negotiated the SUV carefully into. They were only a few hundred yards off the road, yet completely hidden from it by bluffs streaked purple with glittering mineral deposits.

  Prentice fussed about like an old maid. From the pile of trash that had accumulated on the back seat of the SUV he retrieved a square of whitish cotton that he spread on a flat rock. He found the sandwiches Tom had bought during his night-time provisioning and arranged them, together with two bottles of mineral water, on top of the cloth.

  Tom said listlessly: ‘Shrimp cocktail or coriander chicken, Prentice? The choice is yours.’

  Prentice unsealed the cellophane pouch of the shrimp cocktail sandwich and recoiled from the smell. Then he dutifully commenced chomping.

  Tom took his time, feigning picnicking leisure. He raised one of the hot water bottles to his chapped lips, then held it away so he could scrutinize its label. ‘Deep in the desert wastes of the Western Province,’ the copywriter had written, shivering in a smoked-glass fridgidaire in Capital City, ‘Lake Mulgrene stretches for a thousand kilometres across the land, a crystalline expanse of health, purity and hydrolytic balance.

  ‘Here, the Entreati people make their winter encampments, on the shores of what they call “The Great Mirror of God’s Face”. And, employing technology perfected throughout millennia, they refine and distil the precious fluid you are about to imbibe. They call it entw’yo-na-heemo, “The Tears of Paradise”. We call it, quite simply, Mulgrene Mineral Water – because we know you like it straight.’

  Tom laughed sourly and took a swig of the brackish water. Prentice left off his chomping. ‘You ought to watch that, Brodzinski. We’ve only got two or three more litres.’

  ‘I got,’ Tom said, and took another long, defiant swig. He wiped his sore mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I got, Prentice – you don’t got nothing, feller. You wrong grade of astande, yeah. You ain’t got nothing but fiddling about, fiddling about.’ He sang: ‘Tra-la-la, fi-fi-fiddling about!’

  A vacuum opened up inside Prentice’s head, and his features prolapsed into it. ‘What’re you implying?’ he bellowed. ‘What’re you bloody well implying?’ Then, recovering himself, he added, ‘Old chap.’

  ‘Nothing.’ Tom was appalled by the way he backed down. ‘Nothing at all. Calm down, Prentice. Eat your fucking shrimp sandwich.’

  The rest of the repast passed in silence. They sheltered in the sharp shadow beneath the bank of the wadi. Could it, Tom wondered, get any hotter? Unlike tropical Vance, this was a dry heat. He yearned to sweat more freely – but only leaked. He felt his organs boiling in their own salts.

  Prentice finished his sandwich. With vulgar fastidiousness he applied a soiled handkerchief to the deep dimples in his neotenous face.

  ‘There’s one thing I can do,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, and what’s that?’

  ‘Fire a gun – Jethro said that would be fine.’

  Tom laughed, but Prentice was already up from the rock where he had been sitting and waddling over to the SUV. Tom scooped up the picnic litter and joined him. Together, they took down the rifles, got out the automatic pistol and found the ammunition.

  Hefting the naked Galil rifle in his bare arms, Tom felt right and whole. He lifted the warm stock to his cheek: it smelled, suggestively, of oil. He peered into the telescopic sights. Through a notch in the wadi’s bank a patch of bled 500 yards distant sprang into thrilling proximity: a flipper lizard’s neck wattles shook as it panted in silent congress with its own rightness and wholeness. Tom wanted to touch the wattles with his finger. He slowly crooked it, feeling first a solid click, then a firm shove to his shoulder.

  ‘GEDDAWAAYWITHYOUeeeeeeouuuuu!’ the rifle sang. The lizard was on its back, hind legs bicycling, claws snatching dirt.

  ‘Excellent shot, old boy!’ Prentice cried in delight. ‘Excellent bloody shot!’

  ‘Your turn,’ Tom said modestly, and Prentice took up a stance.

  If the Galil sang, the handgun roared: a shuddering boom that echoed through the dry river bed. Arms and knees flexing, Prentice rode out the big Browning’s recoil. The mineral-water bottle he had aimed at was obliterated: plastic shreds lay in the Tears of Paradise.

  ‘Didya see that? Didya? Didya?’ Prentice was cock-a-hoop. He snatched the bush hat from his head and slapped it against his l
eg. He hoed down on the sandy ground, his boots kicking up little dust devils that the breeze waltzed away.

  A whoop sprang unbidden from Tom’s own chapped lips: ‘Woo-hoo! Way to go, Prentice!’

  Suddenly, Prentice was serious, the steely automatic aiming at the ground in front of Tom’s boots.

  ‘Brian,’ he said. ‘Please, Tom, call me Brian.’

  ‘Uh, OK.’ Tom was inveigled by the informality of their mutual gunfire. ‘Brian it is, then, uh, Brian.’ And he completed the outbreak of peace by taking the pack of fifty Greens from his shirt pocket and handing it to Prentice.

  Tom was utterly seduced by firing the Galil: it all came so easily to him. Taking the shells from their cardboard boxes, slotting them into the magazine, fitting the magazine to the breech, lifting the stock to his cheek – these were rousingly instinctual actions, as, with his pulse quickening, Tom manipulated himself towards ballistic consummation. The two men resumed their stances, and soon the evidence of their lust lay smoking on the rumpled rocks – yet they continued to blast away.

  Tom shuffled up a rubbly mound and fired into the mid distance, aiming for rocks that flaked and whined. Prentice assaulted the foreground, loosing off shots with total abandon. The automatic’s magazine emptied before the rifle’s and he called out: ‘I say, Tom, whoa!’

  Tom ceased fire. His cheekbone burned where the Galil had delivered an uppercut.

  ‘How about a photo?’ Prentice was giddy with excitement. ‘My lady wife will get a real kick out of seeing me like this.’

  Reluctantly, Tom fetched his camera from the car, and, as Prentice did a macho dumb show, he shuffled more images into its memory card, where they interleaved with Prentice at Bimple Hot Springs, Prentice in the cloud forest, Prentice on top of the Giant Sugar Sachet.

  Then Tom’s cellphone rang. He hadn’t even realized it was switched on. How, he stupidly wondered, could its battery not have drained away, as they drove for day after day into the interior?