Blood Sport

by Robert F. Jones

  That was the unnerving thing about Beppo—he was so goddam matter-of-fact about death and mutilation. But so were the rest of them in Ratnose’s camp. I had been taught that the inflicting of pain and death was justifiable only in the best of causes—defense of home and hearth, a righteous war, perhaps for a trophy head. We didn’t have to witness the deaths of the animals we ate, and if we thought of it at all, we quickly reassured ourselves that it was painless. These people tortured and killed for entertainment; it was their equivalent of teevee. But at least they were honest enough to accept pain and death when it came their way without whimpering or sniveling.

  “A quick, easy death, like from a bullet through the head, is nothing special,” Beppo told me one afternoon. We had just finished skinning out a black sable, whose hide was drying in the feeble winter sunshine against a boulder. The frail body of the animal, sticky and pink except for a large, misshapen purple bruise that covered its chest cavity, lay bent and (to me at least) pitiful in the weeds. “A slow death without complaint is better, like being skinned alive by your enemies and still having enough strength to spit at them when they peel away your lips. I’ve seen it done—you’ll see it too, when Ratnose gets into one of his moods. And I’ll remember the man who spat in Ratnose’s eye longer than I will the ones who went under quietly, or who whined for mercy. The only afterlife is what other people remember.”

  I recalled what Ratnose had said: A man is the sum of his scars.

  Of course, I didn’t really enjoy thinking about those things, and there was plenty of action just in the daily round to keep my mind occupied. Following Beppo on the trapline for a few weeks taught me where all the good bird covers were. One of the pointers in camp, a German shorthair named Max, was a natural gun dog, all nose and no brains, and between us we filled the larder with game birds: ruffed grouse from the bottoms and blue grouse from the slopes; green pigeons and guinea fowl from the bamboo copses downriver; prairie chickens, sage grouse, bustards, and peafowl from the short-grass prairies; Chinese and golden pheasants from the grainlands near Tor and Hymarind, the only towns in our vicinity.

  At first I felt tense, hunting near civilization, but gradually my curiosity—and a little bit of homesickness, maybe—overrode the nervousness. Now and then, when the shooting was slow, Max and I would ankle into Hymarind and enjoy a day on the town. In the old Chinese market, with its welter of strange sights and smells, I would buy myself a bowl of noodle soup and a tidbit for Max—maybe a sheep’s heart, or a camel’s foot— and we would sit there in the shade, slurping and watching. The townies must have known I was one of Ratnose’s thugs, because they left me alone, but the local dogs weren’t that perceptive: they tried to pick on Max at first, scruffy little yellow dogs with their ribs showing sharper than their teeth, and only after he had killed two or three of them did they wise up. There was no bluster about Max. He would watch an aggressor approaching, all bristly and cocksure, Max staring at him with his flat, amber eyes until the dog was within range, and then Max would uncoil like a cobra and hit the enemy dog in the throat. There was no sound but that of the other dog scrambling to get loose; Max had it by the windpipe and it soon strangled to death.

  Sometimes we would stop at the only American bar in town, a place called the Costive Cowpoke Cocktail Lounge, which was run by a fellow named Hal McVeigh who had stayed on after the war and who suffered grievously from constipation. The bar girls were jolly, and Hal’s war stories kept me fascinated for hours, and the beer was cold enough to sweat. Hal often asked me what had become of good old America, down there at the end of the river, but when I told him, he shook his head and moaned. “Glad I stayed here,” he would say. “Sounds like it turned into a right shitbox.” One day when I came out of the bar, Max was dead. Some mean Chink had fed him a chunk of meat with bamboo slivers in it. Revenge, I guess, for the dogs Max had killed. I buried him behind the bar and then rode back to camp on the motorcycle, but I didn’t cry, though I felt like it.

  After that, I stayed away from Hymarind. Towns were bad news. The people there were sneaky, and anyway, the noodle soup from the Chinese market always gave me diarrhea. What’s more, we were now into the meat-gathering time of the year, and the Husky was valuable for big-game drives. Caribou, elk, aurochs, wild camels, even a few mastodons browsed the prairies near our camp, fattening up in anticipation of winter. We fattened up on them. One day Fric, who had been out scouting for game, rode in excitedly to say that a band of steppe wisent was working down through the brushy draws to the south of us. By the time we got to the ridge from which Fric had spotted them, though, the wisent were already straggling out onto the prairie. We watched them from the shelter of the pines: great woolly black critters that looked like the pictures I’d seen of the American buffalo. “How we can surround them?” Hunk asked. He was in charge of the hunting party, now that his leg had healed. “By time we get down there, they’ll be scrammed.”

  I pointed out to him that my bike was much faster than the horses, so why didn’t I coast quietly down the ridge the way we’d come up; circle around to the tail of the ridge, which would put me in front of the wisent band; and then rev her up real loud and run across their path, spooking them back into the draw, where Hunk and his hunters would be waiting. We did it—and a wild ride it was for me! Potholes and hidden wallows, the dust from the frantic herd swirling around me so that I had to ride by the tips of my boots, great shaggy heads suddenly appearing ahead of me, with rolling eyes and flashing horns, the bike bucking and coughing like Ratnose’s damned bronco . . . But finally I turned them, and then ran in among the stragglers. Hunk had given me a .30 M-1A carbine he didn’t use anymore, and I carried it in a boot on the bike. I drew it now and rode in alongside the big black beasts, choking with dust and my eyes watering, my head gone crazy with the sound of the bike and their hooves, blasting them behind the shoulder and hearing them grunt and crash in the murk behind me, splattered with lung blood that turned to sour black muck, flipping an endo into one deep wallow and luckily getting the bike rolling again before I was trampled. We killed about twenty out of the band, and they were the last wisent that I ever saw.

  Later I discovered that coming off the bike had cost me a broken wrist and a few cracked ribs, so it wasn’t all adventure and joy. Or at least, not all the adventure was joyous. Most of the time, the chores were a lot less exciting. Cutting wood, fixing the roofs of the caves, skinning out and butchering game, sharpening knives and axes, cleaning guns, reloading ammunition from the stockpile of powder and bar lead Ratnose had liberated from a Cambodia-bound caravan—things like that. The winter was cold. We cut ice and skidded it up to camp, packing it in sawdust under a shed in the shelter of the hillside, surrounded by the hay we had cut for the horses. While we were storing the ice, a child from the camp, Blondie’s youngest son, Lump, fell into the hole we had cut and was swept away under the ice. The ice weevils must have got him, because we never found him, not even after the spring runoff had subsided.

  I felt bad about Blondie’s loss—probably worse than she did herself. On the night of my initiation, Blondie had been the first woman to, well, seduce me, I guess you’d have to say. Like all of Ratnose’s women, she was a bear for balling, couldn’t seem to get enough of it, and despite her toothlessness she proved to be what they call a charmful armful. A firm, plump body much younger than her face; muscular little boobs with tips like new asparagus; and a guzzling ginch that wouldn’t let go. Just as my gun dog Max had seemed to be built entirely to serve his nose— eyes, ears, legs, liver, lungs, all there only to propel that ultrasensitive, double-barreled sniffer around the countryside—so too did the rest of Blondie seem to be there only to get her cunt locked around someone’s tent peg.

  I don’t remember much about the seduction itself (rape is too strong a word, though it came closer to that than anything else). Most guys can recall every detail of their First Time, right on down to what color socks they were wearing that day, but I was too strung out on cr
ait and self-esteem for that. The main impression was that all my nerve ends had migrated to my pecker, where they were subjected to a sensory overload of tonguing, stroking, nibbling, tugging, squeezing, and shlurping. Toward the end there, I felt like I was being drawn dong-first into a hot, wet vacuum cleaner made out of meat. With my time sense expanded by the crait, it was impossible to describe my orgasm as a “climax”; it seemed to have no clear beginning, only a steady, smooth buildup of surges, like the pulsations of interference that a passing airplane causes on a television tube, reaching a peak somewhere along in there, I couldn’t tell you precisely when— maybe about 10:47, during the Charmin commercial—but then tailing off with no diminution of ecstasy, so that even hours later I was still getting pleasant little aftershocks. And the strange thing was, I could isolate the tremors of the first orgasm from the ones that followed that night—five or six of them, Hunk later estimated.

  The whole damned gang of thieves and lechers was gathered around, watching us and offering advice while we screwed. I’ve read that many of the so-called higher animals, like porpoises and whales and elephants and apes, get turned on by watching, and that seemed to be the way with Ratnose’s people. Other women in the band took their turns with me that night, the older women mainly, and I can remember being pleasantly surprised to discover that each one of those bearded clams, as my school pals called them, was different both inside and out. One of them had hair on it that must have been three inches long; another one was scalloped around the edges with a flange of slippery skin the color of a dog’s lips; a third pussy—belonging to a flat-faced number named Tekla who was always trudging around camp with a bundle of firewood on her back and who looked about as sexy as a pine stump—sprouted a surprising clit the length and thickness of the tip of my little finger, a prehensile tuning fork the tickling of which could produce sustained high notes of a frequency that would shatter glass. I remember thinking with wonderment that a man could spend his whole life studying the infinite variety of snatch—categorizing it, comparing it, characterizing it, writing odes to each one—and never get bored, never reach any conclusions.

  Right then I had my eye on Twigan, who was standing in the thick of the crowd with an avid look in her own eye. But she wouldn’t come closer, and it occurred to me that, of course, the older women had seniority rights on a newcomer (though I was rapidly waning into a condition that might best be described as “old comer”). Also, she was Ratnose’s favorite, and although the band was basically democratic about sex, the leader had certain vaguely defined rights and privileges that no one might properly challenge. Well, I figured as I humped away there in the glow of the firelight with all those sex fiends ogling me and playing with each other, maybe the time will come for me and Twigan, or maybe it won’t. At least, I won’t be hurting for female companionship in the meantime.

  And I didn’t. Winter marked the end of the mass outdoor orgies, of course, but there was never any shortage of singles, doubles, or triples, either for an hour, overnight, or for weeks at a time. Only rarely was there any conflict—two women after one guy, or vice versa—and then it was always quickly resolved by making it a group thing. There were no really deep attachments or antagonisms between individuals in the camp. It was as if everyone shared a common skin, and in a way a common skull. But within that skin and that skull there prevailed a powerful loyalty, an interdependence balanced with individuality on every level from food gathering to fucking that would tolerate no threat, from either the inside or the outside of the band. I mentioned that to Ratnose one night when we were reloading burned brass in his cave. It was blustery outside, cold and raw, with a smell of snow on the cutting edge of the wind, but our fire kept us warm and a pot of tea was chortling on the hob. Twigan was there, as usual, stitching boot tops in the circle of light cast by the fat lamp. Ratnose walked over to his big bookcase and pulled out a worn, red-jacketed tome. It was The Myth of the Machine, Volume I, by Lewis Mumford. Striking a mock- heroic pose, he read to us:

  “Wherever the seasons are marked by holiday festivals and ceremonies: where the stages of life are punctuated by family and communal rituals: where eating and drinking and sexual play constitute the central core of life: where work, even hard work, is rarely divorced from rhythm, song, human companionship, and esthetic delight: where vital activity is counted as great a reward of labor as the product: where neither power nor profit takes precedence of life: where the family and the neighbor and the friend are all part of a visible, tangible, face-to-face community: where everyone can perform as a man or woman any task that anyone else is qualified to do—there the neolithic culture, in its essentials, is still in existence, even though iron tools are used or a stuttering motor truck takes the goods to market.”

  “Neolithic?” I asked him. “Do you mean were living in the Stone Age?”

  “Why not?” he said. “The New Stone Age. The New Stoned Age! For me it never ended.”

  34

  MAYBE THIS IS AS GOOD a place as any to put down the few hard facts I learned about Ratnose during the time I spent with his band. I sat around with him a lot that winter, reading his books and drinking his tea, talking and just listening to his outrageous bullshit. He was a shifty bastard who got his kicks out of pretending to be a lot of different people at different times, or simultaneously. At various moments and in various places while I knew him he was a priest, a mugger, a scholar, a rapist, a fop, an abortionist, a wit and a fool, a butt and a paragon, an ecstatic and an executioner—all of the above, none of the above, but mostly most of the above. Finally, of course, I came to think of Ratnose as a teacher. A rabbi and a roshi and a Sufi all rolled into one, but with dried blood under his fingernails.

  Since everything I saw and heard concerning Ratnose was contradictory and came in no particular order, I might just as well list my information kind of one, two, three. It makes as much sense that way as any other. Okay:

  27 THINGS I LEARNED

  ABOUT RATNOSE

  1. He is short, but very strong, and has a lot of scars (more about them below).

  2. He likes to wear silk skivvies under his ratskins, particularly during the big Hassayampan holy days, like Fandanay, their combination Christmas and New Year’s celebration where they all get stoned on crait, as usual, and eat a whole baked horse stuffed with kasha and wild apples. Most of his silk underwear is green, though some of it is orange.

  3. His full name is Jean-Luc Pierre Auguste Ratanous III. Either that, or Jack P. Rotznase. I saw wanted posters for him under both names. Of course, there were a lot of wanted posters I didn’t see, or perhaps that he didn’t want me to see. It’s always possible, too, that he had them printed up himself.

  4. His one remaining eye is dark brown—so dark a brown that at times it appears as black as boiling tar.

  5. His age, according to the stories that he tells, is anywhere from about forty-five to a hundred and twenty-five years old. He may be older, but I doubt that he’s any younger. He claims to have known Jesse James quite intimately, and sometimes says that he is Jesse James.

  6. His favorite lunch is a cup of tomato soup and a peanut-butter-and-onion sandwich on rye toast. He likes that for breakfast, too.

  7. He suffers from sinus headaches in cold or damp weather—the result of a war wound.

  8. Sometimes he claims to be the ghost of Calvin Coolidge— particularly when we’re out fly-fishing for brook trout. He does a splendid imitation of Coolidge and other Presidents.

  9. He is a crack pistol shot with either hand, and his preferred weapon is the Walther PPK in 9mm.

  10. He lost his left eye either when he was gouged during a bar fight at the Calgary Stampede in 1947 or as the result of mortar fire in the Siege of Sedan, where he may have served as a poilu. Some say he lost it while playing with firecrackers.

  11. He claims his cock is ten inches long, but only when he’s imitating Lyndon Johnson.

  12. He snores.

  13. Under his right shoulder blade he
has an elliptical four-inch scar of which he is quite proud, maintaining that it was caused by a flint-tipped Assiniboin lance that shattered on one of his ribs, and thus that he is the last man still walking around with fragments of the Stone Age inside him.

  14. He never learned to drive a car.

  15. He denies that he is afraid to ride in elevators, but people who have been in the city with him say otherwise.

  16. Though baptized a Roman Catholic, he now professes faith in the Kandiru sect of Hassayampan Buddhism, an offshoot of the Mahayana branch that first flourished in this region about 900 A.D. and whose main tenet is a belief that the Buddha has returned to earth as the candiru fish—a wicked little creature that enters the urethra of bathers, lodges there permanently with its barbed dorsal spines, and can only be removed surgically. Ratnose has had the operation three times himself, but in his more pessimistic moments admits that he is nonetheless no closer to Enlightenment than he was when his prick was unscarred. He still keeps the last candiru in a goldfish bowl in his cave, and prays to it when he is very drunk.

  17. His favorite horse is a walleyed gelding named Blackie.

  18. His fondest memories are of the years he spent in New York as a streetcar conductor. That was in the ‘90s of the last century, when they still had horse-drawn streetcars. He lived in a boardinghouse on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen, and he knew all the whores and the saloonkeepers and the prizefighters. He had a good friend named Eddie Toller—”a welterweight of little talent but with plenty of heart”—who got drunk one night and was run over by an ice wagon. He had a girl friend named Dora who changed linen at the Waldorf and turned a few tricks on the side—a big redheaded girl whose folks lived on a dairy farm over in Jersey. One day when Ratnose was driving his streetcar up Broadway—he was known as “Jack” in those days—he noticed a fellow smoking a cigarette in his car. You weren’t allowed to smoke on the cars, because the smoldering butts might set fire to the ladies’ long skirts, and there was a sign to that effect in the streetcar. Jack stopped his horses and walked back to the guy, who was a dude wearing a floppy tie and a sailor straw, and told him to stop smoking. The guy agreed, but when Jack got back up front he turned and saw that the dude was still smoking. Jack went back and hit the man in the mouth and threw him off the car. Sure enough, the guy he’d pasted turned out to be the son-in-law of some Tammany Hall big shot, and Jack was fired from the streetcars. He went over to Jersey with Dora and spent a few weeks “listening to the moo-cows” and shooting heath hens, which were still abundant in those days on the Palisades but became extinct about 1920. He sold the heath hens to the market in New York for ninety-five cents a barrel. One day when he was over there selling his birds to the hotels, he spotted the dude who had cost him his job. The dude was cracking a hard-boiled egg at the free-lunch counter at Del- monico’s. Jack went up to him, stuck the barrel of a nickel- plated .32 in the dude’s nostril, and pulled the trigger. Then he walked back out to the buckboard and headed West. Or so he tells it.