by Ryan Ireland
‘Didnt know there was any.’
The old man licked his chops. ‘Whole lot of pussy there at night, ever woman in this village done a bit of whorin. Best way to make money aside from fishin.’
‘That so.’
‘Best to get em in the morning though, when theyre still fresh. By evenin it’ll feel like youre stickin yer peter in a jar of jelly.’
The old man used his chin to point to the smokehouse. A man with an apron stood out front. ‘Right here,’ he said and they set down the sack.
‘Come on,’ the old man said and together they ran back to the docks. The sun was just breaking over the ocean and another ship laden with cargo was coming in.
The stranger lined the bricks along the ground, making outlines of the structures he hoped to build. The weather had begun to turn cold and he wanted shelter. While some of the bricks—the ones with crisp edges and evenly baked—could be stacked tightly, most still required some type of mortar.
The stranger dug an oblong hole, not unlike a grave. First he cut the hard-packed ground with the cow horn, then he used a plank of wood to move the loosened clumps of soil aside. The ground was solid enough that it would hold water should he be able to fill the hole. Rains were scant and short. He opted to waterlog his clothes and wring them into the hole. After his tenth trip, he recognized the effort to be futile. He formulated a new plan and drank more than his fill from the well. He did not work; he simply waited. Then he relieved himself in the hole. He made a few more trips to the well and soaked and wrung his clothes. Finally there was enough liquid to make a paste.
He focused his efforts on constructing a short, three-foot-high wall as long as he was tall. If he could make a wall this big, then he could build fires to cook by in the evenings. Once the fire burned down to coals he could kick the warm ashes into the soil and have a bed to protect him from the cold. Should the weather become colder, as it most definitely would, he could stretch some burlap over some sticks and trap some heat as he slept.
Such were his days, making bricks and mortar, then in the evening, trapping the varmints of this place, sometimes baiting one with the other. Sometimes he cooked them, sometimes he ate them raw. He threw the entrails either into the well or the mortar pit. When the weather turned brutal, the protection of the wall and the warmth of the fire were no match against the plateau winds, so he took shelter in the pit leading down into the well. Down deep enough, the temperature stayed above freezing.
Just as he himself migrated, other creatures began moving, making themselves apparent for the first time. The stranger found a coyote, not much bigger than a loaf of bread, sniffing at the ashes of the fire. Because he was feral himself, the stranger was able to sneak up on the animal without being smelt. With a single jab he pierced through the wild dog’s backbone with the cow horn. It let out a single yelp, squirmed for a moment, but the stranger held fast to the horn and the coyote stopped moving. He picked up the pup, stroked where the fur was still dry. Then he heard a growl. A she-coyote with her mane bristling lunged forward.
The stranger received the attack with open arms. They rolled across the ground. The jowls of the dog clamped on the meat of the stranger’s upper arm. With his free hand he took the coyote by the scruff and pulled her off his arm. A chunk of flesh pulled from his bicep and he began to bleed instantly. The coyote’s snout waved back and forth, a flash of fangs and saliva. Her rear leg kicked, the nails scratching deep into the stranger’s thigh. He let go of the scruff and grabbed the leg, gave it a quick jerk and it broke. The coyote let out a high-pitched whimper, gave another attempt at a bite, then began to scamper away, dragging the now clubbed paw behind her.
The stranger got to his feet. He was smeared in the grease of his own blood. Stumbling toward the wounded creature, he stooped to pick up a brick. The coyote, tongue hanging from one side of her mouth, tried to trot along faster. She whined as she limped along. The stranger caught up to the dog and brought the hardened clay block down on the animal’s skull. A few other coyotes padded by, looking on at the wounded stranger and their dead kin without sorrow.
When the vultures came, the stranger flung stones and killed two of them. He drained the blood from his kills into the well, threw the feathers and brains into the mortar pit. From the coyote’s pelt, he fashioned a loincloth. He used the much smaller pelt from the pup as a head covering, a tendon for a chinstrap. When the snow fell, he scooped it up in his arms and threw it into the well, knowing it would eventually melt.
iv
Years passed this way: with the stranger killing his way through the winter months and in the summer producing hundreds—maybe even thousands—of bricks. By his tenth year of making bricks, the stranger constructed a shanty, a place for him to stay during the winter. The well, now a noxious place festering with flies and forever tainted with rot, provided most of the mortar. As the water level in the well fell, it left mud rings scummed on the walls, making for the best paste. Meanwhile the liquid itself could still be used to make the base for the bricks.
And the bricks themselves had improved integrity in recent years. More often the liquid contained a fair amount of hair and bone and other unidentifiable fibrous materials. Just as the ancient Egyptians used straw to add cohesion to their bricks, the stranger used whatever he could scavenge.
When the first Indians came along, they were puzzled, studying the stranger’s claim. They wandered around his shanty. One picked up the cow skull. Another crouched over a dried splatter of blood, now turned brown. The stranger himself came crawling up from the well, hauling a sack of sludge. The Indians stopped their respective activities and looked at the creature before them.
The stranger set the sack down and stood up straight. He looked from one Indian to the next, each one individually. There must have been a dozen of them.
‘Amigos,’ he said. ‘You should see the place I’m creating.’ The Indians’ brows became collectively screwed at this foreign tongue. The stranger smiled and invited them into his shanty.
At dusk the man came to the slatwood building. The soldier in his limited counseling had told the man that people generally went there when they came into Fort James; he didnt understand why the man went down the side alleyway. Inside the structure whoops of laughter resounded. Men argued. Women laughed and made animalistic noises. The place smelled of smoke and urine.
The man walked around the room once, circling a long wood table.
‘Got a new fish,’ a youngin said. He might have been a couple years junior to the man, but gave the impression that he’d lived a hard life so far and the end was in sight. The man nodded his head to acknowledge the other men there.
The whore he’d seen earlier stood up from a table. She swayed as she spoke. ‘Finalmente venha procura uma mulher?’
Some of the men laughed, but a drunk Mexican sitting next to her reached up her skirt. She let out a yelp, eliciting laughter from all in the building. She leaned over the table with her eyes closed, the skirt now halfway up her back. The drunkard pulled his pants down and mounted the woman from behind. Another wave of laughter and whoops rang out.
‘Acted too late,’ an old timer said.
‘Pardon?’
‘Wanted you,’ the old timer elaborated. ‘Got the Mexicano’s prick instead. Wont even get paid.’ The old timer gave the man a once over and added, ‘Not that you coulda paid her anyway.’
The man took advantage of the impromptu conversation. ‘Soldier from the fort sent me here. Said this is where all the people come.’
‘Sure the soldier didnt say she was where all the people come?’ the youngin said. He pointed at the whore now passed out across the table. Another youngin was pulling her leg straight back. A few whoops of approval went up, but not with the same exuberance as before.
The old timer laughed at the youngin’s joke. ‘Kids alright,’ he said. He refocused his attention on the man. ‘People used to come here. Aint much a reason to any more.’
‘Why not?’
The old timer looked peeved at the further questioning. ‘There just aint nothing to come here for.’
It didnt take long for the boy’s father to become adept at longshoreman work. Within a couple weeks he adjusted so he knew when certain ships would come in. Often times the boy’s father waited up, sitting on the edge of the bed, the metal hooks at ready in his fists. The bell sounded and he walked from the room as if called forth by a voice from the clouds.
Sometimes the boy watched from the balcony as his father worked, hauling sacks of fish, feed, tea and spices. There were odd times, when the boy—he’d adapted too—knew there were no regular ships, yet his father rose from the bed, grabbed the hooks and started for the door. Within a minute’s time, the bell would ring. In the hours following the shifts, his father did not come back to the room. The boy took to looking through the footlocker, what few relics they had from before their time in the Sargasso. His father had long told him never to leave the room without him. Said that if he left the room by himself, he better not come back.
The boy could lay on the floor and press his ear to the boards and hear the muted voices of the people below in the common room. During the day it was mostly longshoremen talking, lying, making up stories, swapping tales about places not-here.
v
The Indians were hard workers. Together the number of bricks produced grew twentyfold, then doubled and doubled again. The stranger became the de facto leader of the cohort. Because the tribe was larger, it was harder to sustain. Some of the men formed hunting parties. They went out for several days at a time and when they returned they brought wild game, already skinned and smoked. They tossed the entrails into the well as the stranger instructed.
The well remained the central dumping site for the tribe. All excrement and waste went into the well. If women cut their hair, the hair was thrown in. Rendered fat from killings, if it was not burned, would also be tossed into the hole. A woman miscarried and the tiny stillborn with the umbilical cord was laid to rest in the pit. In the summer, the stink became unbearable and the women stretched some hides over a frame and covered the well.
The mixing holes were equally disgusting. Shallow things, like graves, the holes were filled with the muck from the well and the dirt was sifted in. Initially the Indians, eager to do their part in the construction process, danced in the pits, slogged the mud into the molds. But their enthusiasm faded and now the pits were a place where men went to be punished. The stranger or some elder might sentence a man who did not catch anything on the hunt to march in place in the confines of the pits. At first time frames were given—a man might have to walk in place in the pit for two days. Then the restrictions were forgotten altogether—the men having to do their time in the pits until another’s indiscretion set him free.
Within a matter of a couple decades, the village was established, small crowded buildings hugging one another, a system of cisterns collected rainwater and stored it in troughs. Children were born and raised knowing nothing but this place. All traces of the fallen tower, the rambling rounded bricks of the ancient Indian settlement, were gone.
That night the man slept in a stable at the edge of town. He tied his mule to a post at the gate’s edge. He crawled under a fence and lay down in a heap of dried grass. As he lay his head in the pillow of feed, he smelled manure. A goat bayed once. A chicken or two flapped their wings. Otherwise things stayed quiet.
He tried to study the sky, but the haze from the fires in the town drowned out the otherworldly lights, and only the brightest of stars could be seen. Soon his eyes grew weary of searching for things not visible.
He dreamt of his time in Port of Tobacco. He relived when he found his father’s stash of bills wedged into a crack in the plastered walls. Without another thought the boy replaced the money and looked about the room. He was old enough to work, though he did not ask why his father wouldnt let him. Most nights his father came in late and did not want to talk. Some nights he brought one of the whores—the innkeeper’s wife or a woman from the pub. No matter, it was always the same. He would make the boy watch while he had his way with the woman.
‘This is how men do it, boy,’ he’d say between thrusts.
Sometimes the woman would acknowledge the boy’s presence; other times the boy just sat as a silent third party in the bed, trying to refocus his gaze out the window. Birds flocked about the harbor, screaming unto the grey skies.
When his father climaxed, he would stand up rigid, then slouch forward, loathe to take his member out. Depending on the woman, they might exchange some utterances. But the innkeeper’s wife would look at the boy. Her brow wrinkled. She shook her head. His father strode across the room and pulled a pair of longjohns from the hook on the back of the door.
‘Father told me bout the Sargasso,’ she whispered. She stretched out one hand and stroked the boy’s face. She was still naked, her pubis still wetted down, teeth marks still rankled around her nipples.
The boy didnt respond.
‘He just tryin to show you how a man does.’
His father, appearing now as no more than a specter in the evening light, turned around. ‘Whad you just say?’
The woman sat up and her breasts rolled forward. ‘Tellin him how you was just tryin to be a good man.’
‘You say something bout the Sargasso?’ He grabbed a hook off the wall and walked across the room, toward her.
She put one hand out to deflect the oncoming blow. Her other hand held up the bedsheet. The hook gigged through the bones of her hand and split down between the index and middle finger webbing. She screamed. Blood trickled down off her elbow and stained the sheets.
‘Get out,’ his father said quietly. ‘Youre just a common whore. Bitch with crotch rot, just like his ma.’
He pointed the hook at the boy, who cowered by the woman in the corner.
The innkeeper’s wife pulled the sheet from the bed, wrapped herself in it and made haste from the room. Droplets of blood marked her path. She looked over her shoulder and cursed both the father and son, said theres no place in the world for either of them.
‘You, boy,’ a boot swatted the man across the posterior. He started awake and scrambled to his feet. It was morning now, though just barely. He turned to face his assailant. ‘This aint no inn.’ The stablehand was a darkman, skin like night.
‘Needed a place to rest,’ the man said.
‘Places for asses, chickens—not people.’
The man nodded. ‘Caint give you pay if thats what youre askin for.’
The darkman huffed. ‘Dont make no difference to me. This place aint mine. I’s here to keep up the place, git rid a the trouble.’
‘Well, I’ll get outta your way then,’ the man sidestepped the stablehand. The hitching post stood solo. ‘Wheres my mule?’
The darkman was already using a pitchfork to scoop up piles of straw and dung. He didnt give the man a glance when he said there wasnt no mule here when he arrived; it mustve been stolen while he was sleeping. ‘Lucky the thief didnt cut your throat open too.’
‘Who do I tell about my mule bein stolen?’
The stablehand’s shoulders seemed to shake with suppressed laughter. ‘Guess you could tell the old commandante,’ he said. ‘But it sounds like he might have his hands full with those injuns they spotted this morn.’
The Indians’ efforts were impressive. Dozens of squared buildings were erected in a matter of years. The bricks, given their potpourri composition, held together rather well. In this place the sun could transform anything. A thicker wall of stones was erected. The stranger ordered it to enclose an entire section of the village. It needed to be twenty feet tall. The wall itself was actually constructed by building two parallel walls. The walls were braced with wooden beams, then filled with dirt and rock. If anyone were ever to attempt to blast through the wall, the insides would spill out on them, crushing them and burying them, leaving their bodies for speculative statements by archeologists.
The wooden beams were farmed from the banks of a river five miles south. Indian men whose arms rippled with muscles carried the trees in their entirety back to the village. From there, other Indians with tools hewed the trees into beams and supports. The wood shavings were either burned into ash or collected; either way they were deposited into the well.
The hunting parties were mostly younger men, still agile, but without the stout body muscle needed for hauling bricks and lumber. They stayed out for weeks at a time, whole packs of them. When they returned, the entire village feasted. They ate bison, bird and deer. The stranger kept an inventory of the kills and who did the killing. By his accounts, the stranger determined one boy did more killing than any of the others.
When the stranger asked the boy’s hunting party how he learned to kill so efficiently, the other boys said he had no rules. The boy killed with whatever means he had. He preyed on weak animals, injured animals, bear cubs and sickly deer. He beat their skulls in with rocks, impaled them with spears, broke their necks with his hands. If he were to ask the Indian boy the same question, the boy wouldve simply responded that he had better rules for hunting. Nothing is sacred in this world. The taste of flesh and the feeling of a full belly is enough to blind any man to the horrors we create. Time, it is known, can heal all things, the layers of dirt and lies building up one on top of another like scar tissue.
It was in this revelation that the stranger knew when the time came for the slaughter of his village, he would have to wait for the Indian boy and his hunting party to be gone—the Indian boy was too much like him to be handled like a common man.
vi
When the time came, his father rose from the bed, dressed, took the hooks from the wall and went to the docks. The bell clanged. The boy knew that since his father cut the innkeeper’s wife’s hand, things would be different. It was one thing for the innkeeper to whore out his own wife; it was another to injure her.