30
At first glance, the camp was a mess. Tarpaper shacks and tepees stood jumbled in the bare valley bottom, while from the hillside gaped the wooden-lipped mouths of dwelling caves. Three or four huge fires sputtered redly under the rain. In front of some of the dwellings stood cranky poles of peeled saplings with skulls on the top, not all of them human. A great mottled, tangled heap of something or other lay at the far edge of the encampment—bones, I later learned, of all kinds from trout through men to mastodons. Even the big vegetable garden at the far end of the camp looked untidy, what with its straggly bean and tomato poles and the mounds of rotting compost that studded it. Wisps of rancid steam rose from the piles and drifted my way.
A herd of perhaps fifty ponies and mules stood drenching in the cockeyed corral, looking as dull and miserable as the weather. Dogs of all shapes and colors and sizes lay curled within their tails under the protection of the eaves. Mastiffs and mournful hounds, bluetick and Walker and black-and-tan. Snipy shepherds and burly, sausage-bodied Labradors. Palsy-walsy beagles and some big stud bassets with balls on them the size of apples. Chows, huskies, malamutes, Dobermans, boxers, spaniels, setters, pointers, poodles, terriers, collies, shelties—every race, along with some monstrous mixes. It occurred to me that either this must be Doggy Heaven or else Ratnose was the world’s top dognapper. Which he was.
As I walked toward the fires, the dogs winded me and set up a hell of a racket. Some of the guard-dog types came trotting out to sniff me over, stiff-legged and growling and with their ruffs all bristling and scary, but my dad always said that if you kept right on walking and didn’t shy away from them they’d usually leave you alone. In fact, he believed that a human being could face down nearly any animal just by heading straight toward it and looking it in the eye. The only creatures it didn’t work on, he said, were sharks, grizzly bears, Cape buffalo, and yellowbellied cowards carrying guns. It worked all right on these dogs, although some of them kept swirling around me and muttering so fiercely that I had to laugh—they got such a kick out of acting mean and nasty so as to impress the other dogs, just like kids on a playground.
But then when I came near the tepees, one of the flaps opened and a toothless old woman with long yellow braids and a leather shirt looked out at me and then ducked back in. She was back out in a second with a poncho over her head and a butcher’s cleaver in her hand. She looked at me again and I smiled, carrying the shotgun now over my shoulder by the muzzle. She ran through the rain up to one of the caves. I stood by the fire, warming my hands in the sweet, steamy smoke.
The old woman came back in a minute with a man who wasn’t Ratnose. The man was about my father’s age, flat-faced and dark, a short guy but with wide shoulders and thick arms under his ratty mackinaw. He was wearing a beat-up old bottle- green derby, and he had a long-barreled revolver strapped on his hip. He said something in a language I couldn’t understand, so I smiled at him and shook my head.
“Hokay,” he said then in a thick, gurgly voice, “Hinglish then. Who you are and what you want?”
“I’m a runaway,” I said, “and I’m looking for Ratanous. I was told that he takes in runaways provided they’re armed and can ride.”
“Not always so,” said Flat-face with a nasty grin. “Sometime de Ratnose he—” and the man ran his finger across his throat with a wicked squitch-ing sound. “Den he cook’um an’ we eat’um,” He pointed to one of the poles with a skull on top. The old woman laughed a dirty laugh, and I could see her tongue writhing beyond her naked gums.
“Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t taste too good. My mother was scared by a bottle of ipecac. Where’s Ratnose?” I figured it was safe to use the nickname, since old Flat-face had used it.
“De Ratnose, he out hunting. Mebbe back tonight, mebbe tomorrow.” Flat-face stopped and looked out into the mist. “Mebbe never come back; mebbe de Ratnose go under”—and he laughed uproariously at the silliness of the idea. Then he turned to me and made a horrible face. “You give me dat shotgun, hear?”
I just stood there and stared at him as steadily as I could, not saying anything. He put his hand on the revolver butt and glowered some more. Rain dripped from the brim of his derby. A few drops splattered on his broad, splayed nose. His eyes were locked on mine, and neither of us blinked. We eye-wrestled for what seemed like half an hour, each of us looking as mean and deadly and serious as we could. Then I slowly crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. Flat-face broke up.
“Haw!” he yelled, scratching his wet nose. “Hokay, kid, you keep shotgun for now. I only want clean him up for you, oil him so he no rust. Nice piece—no like see him get all shitty.”
“Hell,” I said, “why didn’t you say so?” I shucked the shells out and handed him the gun. He spun it neatly, thumbed the breech closed, and swung the gun to his shoulder, dropping a nifty imaginary double—pow, kapow! Then he grinned and gestured for me to follow him up the hill to the caves. Faces filled all the doorways, staring at me as we climbed—mainly kids’ faces and women’s faces, some of them quite pretty, most of them seamed and smoky-colored; a few faces of old men, scarred and hard-eyed. I noticed for the first time that Flat-face was limping. A dirty bandage showed at the top of his rawhide boot
Flat-face’s cave was warm and smoky, with a floor of hand- hewn planks and walls shored up with heavy, smoke-blackened beams. A cast-iron stove glowed apple-red in one corner, its pipe disappearing up into the clay roof. Flat-face put a coffeepot on to boil and gestured for me to sit down in a hide-covered chair near the fire. I slipped out of my shirt and peeled off my boots; I was wet to my soles—to my soul, if the truth be told. The heat felt good, and I suddenly took a great liking to Flat-face, who was pulling his own boots off and looking worriedly at the bandage on his calf. He unwrapped it and revealed a nasty puncture wound, black around the edges, oozing pus.
“Dart shot,” he explained, smiling a bit shamefacedly. “Dayak poison dart. Damn near rub me out”—and he grasped his throat, extruding his tongue and rolling his eyes in accompaniment to a hideous gurgle. “No breathe, all numb, much strong poison. But de Ratnose, he fix with yarbs. Now just left de rot aroun’ de hole.” I rummaged through my pack until I found the first-aid kit. I pulled out a tube of antibiotic paste and handed it to Flat- face.
“This ought to clear it up,” I said. “Just squeeze out the pus and squeeze in the goop.”
“Goop?” he said, and laughed. By the time he’d dressed the wound and rebandaged it, the coffee was done—a strong, green-tasting, pungent coffee that soon had my head expanding like a balloon. Wait a minute, I thought with a surge of fright, he’s doping me! But the worry faded quickly into a warm, grainy feeling, as if my body had suddenly slipped into a broader focus, the molecules moving away from one another to let the warmth and the smoke filter through my hide and circulate around my shivering liver and my goose-pimply heart. Flat-face was cleaning the shotgun: the rasp of the wire brush, the banana smell of nitro solvent, the clean gleam of 3-in-1 oil on the blue barrel; the occasional creak of the stove coupled with the rattle of rain against the door . . . I was drowsy. Flat-face was talking—sometimes in a tongue I could not understand, sometimes in his easy broken English, sometimes singing as he limped around the cave, showing me his trophies: jawbones and fangs, skulls, hides, bits of bent metal from old battles, knives he had picked up here and there, a kukri, a kris, a Green River butcher’s blade ground almost hollow with the years, the metal warm and slick with oil . . . I dozed off.
It was dark when I woke up to distant cheers and muffled gunshots. Flat-face was gone, and outside the oilskin window of the cave I could see the glare of fires and the figures of people capering in the red light. I was very hungry. There was a stone lamp on the table that sputtered with blazing fat, and beside it a loaf of bread and a crumbling wedge of cheese. I hacked off a hunk of each with my pocketknife and, chewing them down in a hurry, the cheese so sharp that my sinuses ached, I looked for something to drink. There was a
bulging possumskin dangling by its looped and knotted tail from one of the wall beams, and I uncorked the snout and sniffed. Wine. I gulped a few swallows, sour and resinous, then filched an apple from the barrel beside the door. Worm-eaten but crisp and sweet, it eased the bite of the wine, which I could feel now spreading warm and strong in my belly. I looked at my shotgun, leaning against the wall, but left it there. No sense in antagonizing anyone this early in the game. I went out and ambled down the hill toward the firelit action, munching my apple.
Half a dozen men on horseback capered around the fires, whooping and posturing and blasting off their guns into the night. The rain had stopped, but a fine fog still filled the sky, blooming like yellow dandelion pollen around the flash of the gunshots. A string of mules stood to their tethers, sullen and heavily laden with quarters of meat, some of it already glazed a greenish black. Ratnose was back, sure enough, and he had scored. I looked for him among the horsemen, but for the longest time I couldn’t spot him: all of them looked ratty and mean, but none of them was big enough, it seemed to me, to be Ratnose.
Two of the riders were just kids, with wispy beards and snotty, self-serving grins and all their teeth, wearing colorful wool serapes over their leather shirts and wide-brimmed cowboy hats with snakeskin bands flashed with cheap brass coins, and big handguns in their mitts. Blam, blam! Show-offs. The other riders were older, slump-shouldered on their mounts and wearing the same shy grin that Flat-face favored after I whipped him at eye wrestling. They were dressed in wool and leather that had gone black with sweat and grease, high moccasins with no spurs, heavy hide gloves to protect against the briers while riding through underbrush, and scruffy fur caps. You weren’t aware of their weaponry—like, the younger riders, I mean they were positively bright with cartridges and foot-long bowie knives, while these older men carried quiet little clasp knives tucked into leather sheaths on their belts, and shortbarreled cavalry carbines whose butts barely peeked out of their saddle scabbards. They sat their horses, lumpy little pintos, with a kind of, well, quiet—no jerking around and sawing at the reins; kind of like the riders grew out of the saddles like mushrooms, but with a sense of poison like a mushroom has until you study it closely and discover its real nature.
Finally, one of the older horsemen held his pony in check, and Flat-face ran up to him, grabbing at the stirrup. He whispered into the riders ear, and the rider looked over at me. Then I knew he was Ratnose. He only had that one eye, a bright black eye that blazed like a match head under the brim of his ratty cap, while the other eye was out, a socket full of black worms—muscles, I guess; but the good eye was more than twice as bright as any eye I’ve ever seen: a real purie. Ratnose looked at me for a while, his mouth limp, deadpan, and then he pounced off his horse. Usually you think of pouncing being an upward movement, but Ratnose made it a movement in any direction. He flexed his thick wrists, and then his body just kind of peeled off of the pony and Ratnose was walking towards me, leading the pony. I couldn’t help thinking that he was a dink of a guy, not much taller than I was, with a bit of a gimp to his walk as if his hip had been broken some time ago; a pointy kind of face, the nose leading the man, unbalanced with that eye gleaming out at you from the side of his head and nothing but blankness on the other side. As he came closer, I noticed that he smelled bad, but then we all did.
“You’re the runaway?” he said. His voice was deep, grating, and I noticed a puckered scar beside his windpipe.
“Yeah.”
“Well, Hunk here says you’re okay.” He gestured toward Flat-face, who smiled his sheepish smile. “Normally I wouldn’t take anybody into the tribe at this time of year, but we made a lot of meat on this hunt and we lost one of our riders. Can you ride and shoot?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe in the morning . . .”
“Sure,” Ratnose said. “We’ll take a look at you in the morning. Meanwhile, you can help out by unloading some of this meat and hanging it in the springhouse, down there by the creek.” He pointed to the stream, toward which a number of men and women were already lugging quarters of meat, bent and dogtrotting under the weight. He flicked me a quick little smile, his goat’s beard waggling playfully, his one eye fixed square between my two. “Welcome to Shit City,” he said.
31
That night, after we had hung most of the fresh meat in the springhouse, Ratnose gave permission for a feast. The women held out one side of an aurochs, which was quickly spitted and set to turning over the big cook fire. The older men grunted and farted under the weight of a huge black cast-iron caldron which they hung by means of a chain and an iron dingle stick over another fire. Soon the caldron was seething: a thick, almost viscous green liquid that smelled like the “coffee” Flat-face had given me. This was the “hempen gruel” my father had always puzzled over when he read about it in Myerson’s book on the Hassayampa: nothing more than liquefied pot, but to take the sleepy-bye out of it, the old men were spiking the broth with white powder—dragon’s-tooth meth, I later learned. A few belts of that stuff and you were strung out like a dancing puppet somewhere between Betelgeuse and Erewhon.
The two young dudes who had ridden with the hunting party stayed away from the liquid grass; they preferred to smoke theirs, in the form of banana-sized “bombers” rolled in tobacco leaves. Apparently there was no shortage of weed in Ratnose’s camp. Later I saw a whole shed packed with the stuff—good-quality smoke, on the order of the best Colombian shit that had been available back home. Another shed was packed with bricks of hash that Ratnose had captured along with an Afghan camel train; the camels had all died of catarrh that winter—victims of the Upper Hassayampa’s hellacious climate—but Ratnose still hoped to deal the hash to some people he knew downriver, so no one was permitted to smoke it, eat it, or even touch it. “Mess with my shit,” Ratnose croaked, “and I’ll smoke you—over a slow fire.”
After everyone had gotten mildly lit, the two young dudes broke out their “axes”—an acoustic guitar and an alto recorder— and got it on with la musica. I had to admit that, snotty and smirky as they looked, Fric and Frac were plenty good. Their repertoire ran from medieval chansons through Elizabethan ballads, show tunes, Sousa marches set to a rock beat, patriotic songs, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and all the way up to Dylan, Joplin, and Kristofferson. Now and then, one or another of the old women sat in with them, with a jew’s harp or a dulcimer or something that looked like a dwarf sitar. Some of the people joined in with the singing—those who weren’t otherwise occupied with wolfing down seared but still bloody strips of aurochs meat that they’d broiled at knifepoint over the fire, or scarfing down mugs of crait (as the hempen gruel was called), or fucking in the firelight. Yes, fucking right there in the open. It shocked me at first—I’d never seen it done before—but Ratnose’s people had no shame. To them it was part of eating and singing and killing and burning and sleeping and waking and shitting.
I first tumbled to what was going on in that regard when I heard a horrendous yelp, a female yelp, coming from the direction of the crait pot. At first I thought one of the women had spilled some of that boiling head medicine on herself, but the yelping continued, mixed in with grunts and yodels and heartrending moans. Murder, I thought, and edged a bit closer to see what was happening, maybe even to catch a glimpse of some gore. What I saw—well, I sure don’t want to sound like some simp, but then again I was a simp when it came to sex back then (I make it sound like it was years ago, and in a way it was). I could see this double-assed animal writhing around on a moth-eaten old horse blanket, its two pairs of legs—one set hairy and the other set smooth—going off in opposite directions, the smooth set flailing at the sky like they wanted to take a running broad jump at the moon, while from the tangle of hair that made up the animal’s gigantic, lumpy head (see? I figured it was one head, not two) came this piteous, horrifying nonstop outpouring of sound. Pain? Complaint? Warning? Glee? I’d never heard noise like that before. Then half of the shaggy head pulled away and turned, and I s
aw my pal Hunks flat, grinning face looking up at me even as he humped away, a pleased and foolish kisser it was, and he said by way of apology tinged with pride, “A real whooper iss dis one—what de Ratnose call a leg-flailing lay.”
I turned away, stunned and blushing, and somebody handed me a cup of crait, which I gulped down without even tasting it, and then I became aware that all around me people were doing it. Old folks and young folks. Old folks and old folks. Young folks and young folks. And over by the corral, old folks and young folks and horses even. Blondie, the toothless old hag with the long yellow braids who had been the first person in camp to spot me, was avidly blowing Frac the recorder player, who scarcely missed a note in the number—I think it was a rock version of the Horst Wessel Lied—until he came. Then he let fly with an exultant wooden bleat.
The crait was hitting me now, and I couldn’t quite handle it all. The fires, guttering and popping. The red, white, and black of the scorched and sizzling aurochs’ carcass turning stiffly on its counterweighted spit, while the coals beneath flared up from time to time with gobs of burning fat. The crait caldron bubbling and belching, its skull-popping steam snaking off through the wet night air toward the corral, where the horses—high on crait steam and bestiality—shrieked and nickered like Hunk’s woman. I dipped another mug of crait from the caldron, determined to get with it, and then tightroped my way through the humping horde toward the edge of the light to wait for the dope to take effect.
At the edge of the dancing shadows, I caught the gleam of metal. A small figure bent and alone. As I ankled closer, the metal object sharpened in focus: it was my dump truck! Somebody was fiddling with my dump truck while Rome burned? Suddenly I felt full of rage, pulsing with a fury compounded of crait and confusion, the day’s anxiety tamped down like priming powder into the frizzen of my fist, the charge rammed home by all those pounding peckers and ignited by that flash of familiar metal. I jumped forward, grabbed a handful of hair, and started slugging: a small kid, no bigger than myself, easy pickings. But I’d thumped away for no more than a dozen good shots when something fiery and fast lashed around my punching arm and yanked me off my victim and over onto my back. Another slash hit my cheek, and I felt it split. I tasted blood.
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