“Well,” said my son, “the lure is wrecked, and I don’t see how we can eat a cop car.”
“Okay,” I said, “but it was a good, game fight, wasn’t it?”
“Sure, but I’m hungry.” He kicked the dead police car back into the river, where it caught among the weeds and then floated, belly up.
“Try this,” I told my son. I handed him a two-ounce, slightly chewed Yellow Cab with a treble hook mounted on the front bumper. “Just cast as far as you can and retrieve quick.”
Inside a minute, he had three wiggling pedestrians on the hook, none of whom put up much of a fight. One was a girl in a patent-leather suit, hooked lightly through the lip, so we released her. The other two—a banker and a hippie—we put on the stringer. On the next three casts, we added a spade pimp, an elevator inspector, the clubfooted editor of a monthly insurance- company newsletter, and three prostitutes, all of them plump and well over the legal size limit. Switching to a feathery, quarter-ounce dildo, we caught two faggots and a tiny old lady who said her father was or had been a candlestick maker.
“I don’t know if we should keep the hookers,” my son said.
“We’ll boil them,” I told him.
“What about the elevator dude?”
“I’m told that they’re edible.”
By the time it was dark, the stringer was thrashing in the black water. I dressed out the catch on the bank, working the knife in mostly by feel, then cutting up to the point of the chin. A secondary pair of cuts along the outer opercle, then a quick rip downwards removed the entrails neatly. I left the reeking innards on the bank for the carrion dragons. Or maybe the mink.
“That Yellow Cab lure is dynamite for small stuff,” my son said as we walked back up through the dark toward camp. “Why do they hit so good on that?”
“They feel they have to run across the stream ahead of it,” I said. “They’re always in a hurry when they see a cab coming down the street. It’s a status thing—dangerous. Some of them actually suck other ones out in front of the cab, like Judas goats, unconsciously of course, but the effect is the same as if they were planning to kill. The ones who follow the unconscious leaders think it’s safe, and then—zip—the hook in the front of the cab snags ’em. It’s not really sporting, in a river like this, but we’re hungry, right? You noticed that the only one who really hit at the cab was that chick in the leather, on the first cast? The one hooked through the lip? Well, we might have made a mistake letting her go—she might very well breed a whole new school of pedestrians who hate cabs, who try and avoid them. But I like to let them go when they’re game.”
We walked on into the dark, cursing as we barked our shins on boulders, whimpering when we ripped our arms and faces on the briers. Then we reached camp and my son got the fire going. I peeled and boiled the pedestrians and skimmed off the goop from the top of the pot (it smelled like turpentine), and we dined al fresco. With the fish course we had Jerusalem artichokes, dug only the previous day, sliced and quick-boiled in popping water, Japanese style. Then a cup of tea, a smoke, the fire dying into that web of red and gray that broadens into sleep.
“Why don’t they take worms?” my son asked, finally, just before we dozed off.
“You can’t run across the street ahead of an oncoming worm,” I yawned. “No virtue in it.”
18
BACK IN THE DAYS of the Mao Mao Emergency, the government surreptitiously organized bands of hunters, trappers, and retired military men to track down and kill the insurrectionists on the upper Hassayampa. Members of these “pseudogroups,” as they were euphemistically called, became masters of disguise, sometimes to the point of psychological confusion. They wore the slouch hats and surplus army greatcoats affected by the insurrectionists—those long, olive-drab woolen cloaks under which each man packed a Sten gun and a razor-sharp kukri, optimum weapons at close quarters. Before going out, they blackened their hands and faces with burnt cork or walnut juice, depending on the length of the mission. (It took weeks for the walnut stain to wear away. I recall my uncle saying, on his return from one mission: “You go out a nigger, come back a Digger, and a month later you’re still a Chink.”)
More importantly, each pseudogroup member had to know the habits of the enemy down to the most banal detail. “You had to figure that you were under observation all the time,” my uncle said. “Our favorite tactic was to walk into a Mao Mao camp at nightfall, pretending to be a new batch of recruits joining the cause. If our acting hadn’t been perfect up to that climactic moment, we’d likely as not be greeted with lead and steel. If we’d actually fooled them, we could walk right up to point-blank range before whipping the Stens out of our overcoats and opening fire.
“It was the little things that betrayed you most often. Your Mao Mao buck always ate fruit and vegetables with his bare left hand. He ate meat with his right, cutting and spearing it with a butcher’s knife. But if he was eating fried ants—you know those big white ants that live in dead stumps up on the Hassayampa?—he’d eat with the fingers of his right hand but wipe away the grease with his left sleeve. Many a pseudogroup went under by failing to eat ants in the proper manner. Another thing: when a Mao Mao took a leak, he never touched his dingus. He spread the tails of his overcoat and hunkered down like a woman. I was in one group led by a fellow called Freddy Palmer. We were up in the foothills of the Altyn Tagh late one summer, up at the edges of the bamboo where the main force of the Mao Mao was hiding out, and one morning Freddy forgot to squat. I remember I was sitting next to the cook fire waiting for the tea to boil—the Mao Mao loved tea, scalding hot and with plenty of condensed milk and sugar—when I heard something hissing. It wasn’t the pot. It was Freddy, standing there at the edge of the light, sleep still thick on his fat black face, his dong in his hand, wee-weeing into the dawn. I was about to whisper a warning to him when—brrrrrttt!—someone cut him down with an AK-47. Then two grenades hit the camp, whump- kerwhump, and we had a hell of a firefight for about ten minutes. When the firing stopped and we could hear them crashing away through the bamboo, I bellied on over to where poor Freddy was lying. He was sure enough kufa—dead as they come —and his poor pale peter still draining. He hadn’t even stained it black like we were supposed to. Some inhibition, I guess, about being black to the roots of his manhood—something silly like that. Anyway, he couldn’t have drawn their fire more effectively if he’d stood there singing ‘God Bless America’ and waving the Stars and Stripes.”
During the last year of the insurrection, my uncle took me up the Hassayampa for a Mao Mao hunt. “I know a camp up there that hasn’t been hit in years,” he told me. “We should be able to count plenty coups.” He told my mother that we were going partridge shooting upstate, but when he came to pick me up in the Jeep before dawn one snowy December morning, he winked and pointed to the gear piled behind the seats. The overcoats smelled of mud and jungle and the sharp reek of cosmoline on the Sten guns underneath them.
We drove up the Interstate in the dark, my uncle sucking on a cold bottle of Pabst while I sipped coffee from the thermos, listening to the radio. “I’m sending you a big bo-kay of roses . . .” I was sixteen that winter and madly in love with a girl named Wendy Winchester, so the music and the dark worked their poignant magic all too well. Wendy Winchester had been run over by a car a few weeks earlier and badly injured. She’d live but she might lose a leg. I sat there listening to Eddie Arnold, wishing that it had been a Mao Mao that had hurt her and that I was on my way to get revenge, but it had only been a drunken Polack from the South Side.
The car, an Olds 88, had hit Wendy and four other girls where they stood on a street corner after a high school football game, waiting for the light to change. The other girls bounced off the fenders and escaped with cuts and bruises, but Wendy had been driven back up the hillside under the car, crushed into a privet hedge back of the sidewalk. It took half an hour to get her out from under the car. “All I can remember is the sound of those bushes crackling around me,”
she said one evening when I went to see her after she’d gotten out of the hospital. “At night now, when I hear a car crunching through the ice and snow . . .” She shivered, lovely and wounded.
My uncle and I stopped at Chicane for ham and eggs, then went back into the men’s room of the diner to put on our disguises. “Rub that walnut stain in as smoothly as you can,” my uncle warned. “And don’t forget your pecker—remember what I told you about the late Captain Palmer.” After he had stained himself properly, my uncle slipped a short Afro wig over his wavy white barrister’s hair and pulled an Amos V Andy face. “How’s Ah look, Bruthah?” I told him he looked “right on,” or whatever they say. “You let me do the talkin’,” he said.
When we came out in our slouch hats and overcoats, our hides as black and glossy as the diner’s griddle, the, counterman reared back in mock fright. “Goin after Mao, are you?” he said. “Well, you shoulda been here last week. A few of the local boys went up in the hills just after that light tracking snow and nailed two of ’em. The bigger one dressed out at two hundred and fifteen pounds.”
My uncle said that he had never hunted anyplace where it hadn’t been better last week.
“Good luck,” said the counterman as we left. “And don’t you come back no Mao—haw!”
Off the highway, my uncle put the Jeep into four-wheel drive and we bumped into the hills on a tote road that soon faded into a mere trace. All too often I had to jump out and pull a wind- downed tree off the road. “That’s a good sign,” my uncle would say, dragging alternately on his cigar and on a fresh beer. “Nobody’s been through here in a long time.”
We made camp that night in the snow of the Altyn Tagh foothills. I pushed down into the alders with my 12-gauge Stevens and jumped two spruce grouse. I killed the first bird clean on a straightaway shot but missed the second and went on after it, hoping to jump it again—we were far enough away from the Mao camp for the shots to go unheard. As I came out of the alders, I spotted the silhouette of a grouse, motionless in a tree ahead of me. This was meat hunting, so I shot the bird off the limb, but when I went to pick it up, I found that it was long dead and already rotted almost hollow. It sure wasn’t the bird I had flushed.
Walking along into the woods, I saw many grouse dead in the trees, toes locked in rigid death grips on their roosts. I shook a few out of the trees and all of them were light, dry, almost mummified. I broke one open, as one might a fortune cookie, and its body cavity was crawling with shiny red beetles. When I opened the bird that I’d killed earlier, I found a spongy pink mass of larvae in its craw and stomach. I threw it away with a shudder and went back to camp.
“You didn’t have to throw it away,” my uncle said when I told him about the beetles. “The meat was still good. Those beetles only eat the guts and the stomach lining of the grouse, and they aren’t a parasite of man in any case.” He was leaning back in a camp chair next to the fire, with a brandy-and-soda in his hand and his ample belly toasting in the heat. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. While you were out beating the bushes with the old fire stick, I hobbled on down to the stream and picked up these.” He lifted a stringer from beside his chair and showed me six fat Dolly Varden trout, not a one of them under fourteen inches. “If you want to catch bull trout,” he laughed, “send a bullshitter.” We dined on trout and fried potatoes, along with a bottle of Schwarze Katz Liebfraumilch chilled nicely in the snow.
The next morning we ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs and cold trout, locked up the Jeep, and started the long walk up into the foothills. At first light, my uncle pointed out a pall of blue smoke that hung over the hills to the southwest. “The Mao Mao are making charcoal up there,” he said. “It’s a good sign.” The going was slow—my uncle’s game leg held us back, and he was no longer in top shape thanks to all the booze and cigars he consumed—but by late afternoon we were within the perimeter of Mao activity. Whole hillsides had been stripped of brush and second-growth forest to feed the charcoal fires, leaving the land open to erosion (and also creating excellent fields of fire through which we had to crawl on our bellies, using the gullies caused by the autumn rains to maximum advantage).
When we came within sight of the main camp, it was almost sundown, and we lay up behind a brush pile to work out our plan of attack. The camp consisted of half a dozen teepees clustered around a low, log-built blockhouse. A few horses—seedy pintos, mainly—were corralled at the edge of the camp, and we could see women walking back and forth through the snow, their easy Nigger stride thrown off just a touch by the heavy boots and cloth wrappings they wore to fend off the cold. They were handsome women, many of them with shaved skulls, and those without overcoats were also bare from the waist up; their heavy tits swung glossy and gourdlike as they walked. I thought of Wendy Winchesters budding breasts, tender little pink- tipped things that bore about as much relation to these women’s breasts as young strawberries might to plums. I suddenly realized I was hungrier than I was scared.
“We’ll make our move when most of the men are in from the woods,” said my uncle. “We’ll come in out of the dusk, real casual. Keep your overcoat unbuttoned and hold the Sten inside it, down your leg, through the pocket slit. When we get up close —you’ll feel it when they realize we’re not legit—just up and cut loose. Keep your fire low; these pieces have a way of walking up on you even when you hold them sidewise. And stay low yourself in case they shoot back.” He handed me two frag grenades and an incendiary. “When you’ve shot out your first magazine, flip one or two of these into the teepees and lay low while you reload. Now, I’m going to stay here while you belly on over to the right, toward the next brush pile. You’re skinnier than I am, and quieter, so they won’t see or hear you moving. Position yourself so that you can see me, and when I get up and start walking in, you do the same. That’ll be about ten minutes from now. Got it?”
“What about the women and children?”
“You get the same ten bucks for any ear, regardless of age or sex.”
“I mean, should we, like, kill them too?”
“I’d prefer not to, but it’s hard to distinguish in the dark, and anyway, the women and kids shoot just as straight as the men if you give ’em the chance.”
I went silent and looked away.
“What’s the matter?” my uncle whispered. “Squeamish? Remember, all of these people—the grown-ups, at least—have killed at least one other human being as part of their oathing. Many of them have killed more. They kill their own wives and parents and children as part of the oathing, and then stuff them down wells or sewers. They believe in rape and torture and public ownership and free dope and poaching, and they have too many babies and a whole hell of a lot of clap.”
“Okay,” I said, “but where do we meet in case we get separated?”
“Wait for me at the Jeep if you can,” he said. “You know where the rest of the ammo is cached. But if you can’t wait, head on back to the highway. Ill see you back in town, unless I go under.”
When I got over to the other brush pile, I checked out the Sten gun. It felt cold and greasy, and the snick of the slide as I put a round in the chamber sounded too loud to go unheard. I looked up, scared, like a kid caught looting a comic-book stand. I found myself struggling to stifle a giggle: it was crazy, two of us taking on an armed camp of overt oathing murderers, some of them with the biggest tits I’d ever seen. But now the men were drifting back into camp, swinging their axes and brush hooks with that happy Nigger rhythm, slapping their chests and thighs and calling out in falsetto voices to their wives and horses.
When my uncle rose and began limping into camp, I fired a burst from the Sten up into the sky and took off back down the mountain.
As I ran, I could hear his gun chattering, his grenades whomping, and the slower, heavier chug of their firearms. The horses screamed over the gunfire. I was too fast—too much in motion— to feel any regret.
A few nights later I was in Wendy Winchesters living room, drowning my doubts in Che
rry Heering and enjoying one of Wendy’s exquisite hand jobs. She was fascinated with my walnut-stained pecker. “It looks so much stronger,” she said, stroking away delicately. Her ruined leg was up in its cast, covered with inscriptions that said things like get well soon, gimpy!, and the scars on her face were healing into tender pink grooves that matched the avidity of her lips. It was Christmas Eve—her parents were out visiting relatives—and the only light in the room was the rainbow light of the tree. Just as Wendy went down on me—oh, ecstasy!—I heard a Jeep pull into the driveway. Ice crunched under its wheels, and she shivered.
It was my uncle, back from the dead.
“Hey, you little shit-head,” he yelled as I came out of the house. “I thought I’d find you here.” He was staggering with brandy, and his white roach of lawyers hair waved merrily above his walnut-stained and smiling face. “I brought you a present,” he said, opening the back of the Jeep. “Merry Christmas!”
Inside the Jeep . . .
19
BY NOW WE WERE deep into Ratnose’s country. My night sweats told me so, if my compass didn’t. His presence rattled the trees around our campfire, bounced off through the brush with loud, white-tailed leaps. Wind and deer, perhaps, are the essence of Ratnose. To shore up my determination—it was eroding fast—I opened Myerson and looked for references, hoping they might reassure me. I found them, all right, but they did little to bolster my courage.
“Bandits abound on the upper Hassayampa,” he writes in Chapter XXXIV, entitled “Tristesse on the Tributaries.” “Indeed, local legends resound to the screams of slaughtered peasants, of missionaries eviscerated and forced to devour their own reeking bowels, of explorers and military men cooked over slow fires. The high peaks and precipitous valleys of the region provide excellent cover for robber bands; the abundance of game, both birds and beasts, offers sustenance even in seasons when weather prevents travellers from transiting the region. According to the myths of Medieval Islam, the Old Man of the Mountains and his infamous Assassins (Hashishins) were wiped out long before Marco Polo crossed the dry heights of Persia en-route to his historic sojourn with Kubilai Khan. Not so. They merely moved east, into the country of the Hassayampa. To this day, hemp and horror dominate the countryside, one taking strength from the other.
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