“I know it now,” he said. “You don’t have to beat it.”
48
ONLY THE ILL and the old stayed behind when Ratnose’s gang ascended the Altyn Tagh. There was a carnival air to the march. Children scampered around the horses, skittering between their legs even as they climbed, gaudy gadflies, squealing and chirping excitedly. The women were dressed in their holiday finery—headbands and shawls of red, yellow, green, orange, purple. The men wore their talismans of bear claws and elks’ teeth, aurochs horn and ivory, dragon’s eyes and mummified human fingers. Some tied fangs and feathers to their trigger guards. A mixed, unorchestrated chorus of bells accompanied the group, surrounded it, preceded it. Camel bells, yak bells, reindeer bells, cowbells, carabao bells, elephant bells, sleigh bells.
Slay bells, thought Tilkut, riding beside Ratnose near the head of the ragged column. His confidence had waned a bit since Runner’s return. Ratnose had quickly brewed a vat of the ketwai poison and then tested it on the puppies in the compound. Tilkut watched, stone-faced but impressed, while Ratnose fed the heavy line out through the guides with a practiced double haul, the line hissing ominously through dozens of false casts (Ratnose was showing off his strength of wrist), then laying out neat and straight, the leader with its deadly fly pausing just for an instant over the stupid, grinning puppy face, then dropping in to sting. A yelp, a moment of frantic, puzzled scratching, and then the puppy went limp—its eyes glazed; fleas crawling on its fat, soft belly. Ratnose killed six that way in half an hour. “Enough for breakfast stew,” he said, smiling.
Tilkut chose not to practice on the puppies. He had no stomach for killing dogs. In fact, the killing of any animal was beginning to pall on him—any animal but man. He took his fly rod and waded down the river to practice on fish, with an unpoisoned, barbless fly. Standing waist-deep in the icy spring water, naked to test himself against the cold he would have to endure on the Altyn Tagh, he worked his arm and his eye back into shape. As he cast, he thought about killing. Yes, man was his meat now. As a boy, even as a young man, he had enjoyed killing game. The splat of bullet on flesh had given him a godlike sense of power, an awe at his own skills, at the fact that it was his choice these creatures should die. But as he grew to know more about wild animals and their ways of life, their guilelessness, their simple and thoughtless courage, the god role had gradually come to feel obscene. At the same time, he was coming to detest man, the inventor of gods. Man the filthy, man the self-delusory, man the pompous, the grinning, the smart-ass, the sanctimonious, the greedy, the cowardly. Snivelers who beshat the earth. He came to feel that he could kill most men with no more compunction than other men would feel in killing rats. Not all men. Some were still worth saving—the few who were tough without posing, honest without self-congratulation, faithful to their wives and friends without the usual smarm of guilt. . . .
A fish slammed the fly, leaped, then took off downstream while the reel chattered. Tilkut checked the fish just above the next riffle, turned it finally, stripped in line like a mad masturbator. The fish paused for a moment, shaking its head. Then it raced off again while the rod bowed, an anxious servant. Tilkut followed, up to his armpits now in the numbing water, his bare feet skidding on the slick boulders. He checked it again, turning the fish into the back current along the far bank. A belted kingfisher flew over, peering curiously at the action. Tilkut retreated to the shallower water. The fish was under control. He played it as gently as the tippet would permit, knowing that with the barb pinched down on his fly, he could give it no slack. With most of the line back on the reel, he was breathing confidently for the first time when the fish rolled just fifteen yards out. It was a huge rainbow, scarred and bent-jawed, and as it rolled, it slipped the fly. Tilkut watched it sink, finning and working its gills, its eyes on his, out of sight. . . .
Now, riding beside Ratnose toward the Suck Hole, Tilkut felt uneasy. His wrist was strong, his eye was sharp, but his luck was uneven. Hell, his luck was downright rotten. His son had not spoken to him, except in the most routine manner, since his return from the ketwai tree. Maybe the kid planned to stay even if Ratnose died. Right now he was chugging along on the dirt bike, with his girl friend riding behind him, squirting ahead every now and then to the delight of the women and children, cutting doughnuts in the pea gravel, vaulting ruts and logs. He was a young hero in these mountains. Down in the flats he would be just another beginner. Everything he had learned here was useless down below. Hunting, tracking, trapping, fishing, shooting—all of those things were anachronisms, sentimental vestiges, child’s play. Even his skill on a bike, honed to perfection up here, was worth little more than fool’s gold at the far end of the Hassayampa. With good luck, a rider might earn $80,000 in one season, then lose his kneecap the next. With bad luck, he might punch a hole in a concrete retaining wall and be remembered awhile for his bloodstains. “Yeah, that’s where Runner died—hit the wall at a hundred and twenty and went right on through. They scraped him off Speedway Avenue with a pancake turner. There were bits of his pecker in the carburetor . . .”
Fuck the judgments, Tilkut thought. The kid can do what he wants to do. I’ve got to concentrate on the job at hand. Killing Ratnose. Relax, enjoy the scenery. And he did: the waning of the timber as they climbed; the stunting of the shrubbery; the gradual accession of the mosses and lichens. Eagles turned on the ground wave of rising air. Dwarf deer scampered up the rocky draws—olive-colored creatures no larger than dogs. Rills and rivulets sparkled in the sun. A family of sheep, drawn by the bells, stared down at them from an impossible cliff, the ram with a curl and a half of heavy, frowning bone on his brow. Runner borrowed Hunk’s .243 Browning and sighted in on the great, grave ram, taking a rest across the seat of his bike. He squatted there, concentrating death through the scope.
“Don’t,” said Tilkut.
Runner looked around at him. Their eyes met. Tilkut could feel the outrage in his son’s eyes, and his own rose to meet it. They stared at each other.
“Do you need the meat?” Tilkut asked.
“I want the trophy,”
“A windfall trophy? A trophy you just happened to luck into? You didn’t hunt the bastard, you stumbled onto him. Why don’t you save yourself the climb and buy that big head off of Rat- nose—the one he uses for a backrest?”
Runner handed the rifle back to Hunk. He shrugged to Twigan: The old man’s nuts.
So much for fuck-the-judgments, Tilkut thought. So much for letting him do what he wants to do. Well, anyway, he still values my opinion of him. Relax, enjoy the scenery.
They heard the Suck Hole long before they saw it: first a murmur, then a growl, finally a graveled, grating roar. Mist hung thin and rainbowed over the rocks. The children ran ahead, excited by the sound. When the main body of horsemen came up, the children were throwing stones and driftwood into the whirling vortex. It was bigger than Tilkut had imagined, frightening in its slow, inexorable acceleration. The two tributaries swept down from the peak of the mountain in a shallow V, seemingly innocuous with their borders of pink and purple lichen, their blanched boulders and glinting rapids.
One of the children threw a piece of driftwood into the exact confluence of the streams, perhaps a hundred feet from the Suck Hole itself. A dog—a shaggy, happy collie bitch who had followed along from camp—leaped in to retrieve the stick. She pad- died strongly, angling downstream to intercept it. She took it in her jaws and turned to struggle back toward the bank. She made no headway. Panic entered her eyes. She was pulled backward, Tier ears peaked as if they might by themselves draw her to safety, while everyone watched. Some of the women laughed, and the children followed suit—all but the child who had thrown the stick. The collie bitch kept scrambling even when the whirlpool caught her, turning her around and around, still holding the stick in her jaws as she disappeared into the guttural, mumbling mist. The children laughed and laughed.
Ratnose chuckled and poked Tilkut in the ribs. “As I said, it’s not so nice at t
he Suck Hole.”
They dined that night on dog stew and roast aurochs, head cheese and broiled trout—fresh-speared from the Yampa, where a long, cold pool held hundreds of fat rainbows. Brown rice, boiled roots, watercress. Tilkut had to admit that Ratty’s people ate well. He himself was not hungry. He nibbled a side of trout, chewed a sprig of watercress. He stayed away from the crait, which was bubbling merrily in its customary, inevitable cast- iron pot over the men’s fire. Let them scramble their brains; he wanted his hard-boiled.
Pretty soon they all started guzzling, then giggling, then rushing off to their saddlebags to fumble for their nose flutes and jew’s harps and mandolins. Or whatever they called them. In a little while, the music threatened to drown out the sound of the Suck Hole. The nightly orgy got under way. Tilkut watched it through hooded eyelids, his mouth curled in contempt under his moustache. All that groping, stroking, poking, whooping, swapping, sucking, grouping—and in front of the children!
He saw two little kids—no more than four years old, he guessed—trying to imitate the grown-ups. The little man on top couldn’t get it up. He shook his tiny dong and yelled at it in Hassayampan. No go. The little man laughed—a katydid’s chirrup in the dark—and rolled away. When the kid underneath stood up, Tilkut saw that it was another boy. Tilkut was tempted to go over there and tell them what was what, but he didn’t have the words. He saw Runner and Twigan balling at the edge of the firelight. Runner was doing all right, he thought. A good, steady stroke, plenty of hip action, no fears of premature ejaculation . . . What the hell am I doing? he thought. What place is this? How can this be?
A woman came over and sat down beside him. She was toothless, round-eyed, with hip-length blond hair. She flashed her gums at him and reached for his groin. She flipped a tit out of her blouse. It was long, veined, scarred in places with stretch marks, culminating in a nipple that looked like the face of a pug dog. Stunned, Tilkut let her take his hand and place it under her skirt. Horrified, he felt his fingers working of their own volition. Amazed, he found himself palpating those slippery walls, twanging that rigid thumblet. Flabbergasted, he realized vaguely that his own dong was feeling the breeze, stiff and. eager, with a mind of its own, responding like an eager gun dog to the toothless woman’s caresses. Unbelieving, he discovered himself mounted upon her, into her, fucking away like a veritable demon—like his own son, by God—humping and thrusting with the toothless woman all agroan beneath him, yelping her craitstained breath into his nostrils, her legs wrapped around his ears, her voice rising to a crescendo of whoops and howls that erased the disbelief from his brain just as the music had drowned out the death song of the Suck Hole. . . .
“Hey, Pop, pretty good!” said Runner, staring down at him with the first smile he had seen on his son’s face since they had been reunited. Runner was standing there with Twigan and Ratnose and the rest of them, gathered in a circle around Tilkut and Blondie where they lay in the scuffed and scattered gravel. Everyone was smiling—even the two misguided four-year-old pederasts. They had never seen a Bear God screw before. Or so Tilkut thought, laughing.
49
“LOOK,” he asked Ratnose the next morning, “do we have to go through with this?”
They were naked in the chilly mist. The sun, still red and huge, had not yet burned away the cold. The rest of the gang huddled on the boulders of the riverbank, wrapped in quilts and skins, staring glumly at the two combatants who stood just short of the water with their poisoned fly rods in hand. Ratnose put a hand on Tilkut’s shoulder.
“No other way,” he said. “You hurt me years ago. You killed some of my men quite recently. I stole your son. I tried to pervert him to a way of life alien to what you had planned for him. Moreover, my people expect an entertainment.”
A dog yapped on the bank.
“It’s not that I’m afraid . . .”
“I know that,” Ratnose said. He smiled and gripped Tilkut’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Tilkut said. “I never wanted to kill you—at least, not back then when we shot up your gang down on the lower river. I brought my son up here this time because, in a way, though I fear you—or feared you back then, before we left—I felt we could learn from you, from being near you. You’ve taught him a lot, and taught me a lot, too. I admire you. . . .”
“I’m a cruel man, Tilkut. A killer. A thief. A believer in torture and revenge. A believer in entertainment. Food, fucking, song, blood, sleep, contests—things like that. I stole your son.”
“If he wants to stay, he can stay. That possibility was implicit in my decision to bring him up here; I know that now. But I don’t want to kill you.”
“I don’t die that easily,” Ratnose said, grinning again. “And anyway, death doesn’t hurt. Living can hurt, if you live wrong. But let’s get it on. The people are waiting.”
They waded into the stream, plodding slowly so as to keep their footing on the slimy boulders of the bed, drawing farther and farther apart as the water rushed between them and they approached their designated stations at the edge of the whirlpool. At one point, Ratnose yelled something to Tilkut, but the noise of the water drowned it out. Tilkut shrugged, smiled his incomprehension, and kept on wading. The water had reached his balls now, and he felt himself shrink from it: entering cold water was always a torture. He caught the thrust of the river against the small of his back, braced against it, found his stride, and plodded on. A trout skittered out from its holding place behind a large, pink boulder and brushed against his thigh— quickly electric. It spooked him for a moment, and he paused, the rod held high overhead so that none of the gummy poison would wash from the fly, clinched tight in the wire half-circle above the cork butt. Then he waded forward.
When he came to his station, he turned and stared back through the mist. Ratnose was a small, distant figure—a head, two arms, a chest above the water, nothing more. The figures on the bank blurred in the fog. There was no sound other than the roar of the whirlpool. He realized that, because of his greater height, he offered a better target to Ratnose than Ratnose did to him.
That tricky bastard!
He felt the old rage light off in his belly now, paranoid kindling, better than none. He waded out a few more steps, until the water reached his nipples. It was numbingly cold, but nothing he couldn’t tolerate. He planted his feet in the rocks, gripping the gravel with his toes, finding a comfortable purchase. Then he unhooked the poisoned cow-dung fly and held it carefully in his left hand while he stripped the leader clear of the guides and brought the nail knot and the first few feet of fly line clear. He began his false cast, working fly line out and up-eleven o’clock, pull back to one o’clock, open the wrist, drift, forward again to eleven, the power stroke—the line seeming to slice the fog with a wet snicker, then lashing ahead in its easy sinuations until he could no longer see the knot.
He false-cast for a while, staring through the mist toward Ratnose, who seemed to be motionless in the distance. He kept the line moving; good—his arm was still strong, no fear of going dead this early in the game. Then the light suddenly increased, as if someone had turned up a rheostat, running quickly up from blue to gray to green to gold to silver, and he heard a hiss near his ear. The sun popped clear. The fog was gone. The hiss repeated itself, and—turning his eye—he saw a yellow stripe of line flick past, followed by the glint of a leader and, at the end, a blurred black speck.
Ratnose’s fly.
He glanced back toward the place where he had last seen Ratnose, standing motionless in the chest-deep water. He focused more closely, and his stomach clenched.
Shit! A false Ratnose!
A tree stump!
His eyes swung frantically, right and left. The real Ratnose was masked against the shore: close—much closer than Tilkut had thought—so close that he rose huge and toothy like a monster from the gravel pit. I missed him in the fog, goddammit, Tilkut raged; the fucker, he conned me. . . .
But Tilkut’s own fly was still a
irborne, reaching out toward the false Ratnose, the tree stump up the river, now—with the fog gone—so patently a tree stump, with its snaggy roots resembling arms, its bark scarred and peeling: a tree stump washed down river in the night, goddammit. . . . My line’s too far out, Tilkut raged, stripping it in, trying to work it around toward Ratnose even as he heard Ratnose’s fly buzzing near his ear. . . . Cursing as his fly ticked the water—There goes some poison, bloody hell!—his arm twitching back and forth like the big hand on a clock gone berserk—eleven, one, drift, eleven, push, eleven- realizing suddenly that he had stripped in more than he needed—his fly flickering short of Ratnose now—stepping forward in a rush to bring it closer—hearing a snick behind him, and feeling the spray of water on his neck from Ratnose’s fly where it had missed, then hearing Ratnose’s line hit the water beside his leg . . .
He saw his line straighten out above Ratnose’s head. He saw it settle for an instant. He saw Ratnose’s face, grinning, teeth clenched, the eye on him as hollow as a bullet hole. He struck. He felt his fly hang home, saw Ratnose’s head tip forward, the twitch of hair on Ratnose’s head where the fly had snagged him, and he stripped in line as fast as he could, straightening the slack, exultant . . .
And felt the bite on his ankle. Just a nip. A sharp, stinging tug in his right ankle that scarcely shifted his balance on the shifting bottom, scarcely penetrated the numbness of the river’s cold. But he was hooked, and he knew it. A thrill of horror shot through his gut. A double hookup—he had Ratnose, and Ratnose had him. Already the poison was working. The toes of his hooked foot cramped painfully, briefly, then went dead. A numbness far colder than that of the river began to spread upward from his ankle.
But I have him by the scalp, Tilkut thought, and for the poison it’s a shorter trip from scalp to brain than it is from the ankle. He leaned back against the strain of the line, the rod bent and throbbing with Ratnose’s struggles, trying to drag Ratnose off his feet and into the grip of the current; but Ratnose shook his head, still grinning, then thrust his head forward, hoping to gain some slack, his hand fumbling at the back of his head, trying to unseat the poisoned barb. But I have him good now, Tilkut exulted, he’s got to fall, he’s got to fall! He redoubled his efforts to pull Ratnose off balance. The numbness had reached his knee by now; his thigh muscles were fluttering. He planted his good leg against a boulder and surged once more against the rod.
Blood Sport Page 21