Animal (Chapter 8 - Part 1)

The last of the Larrity townsfolk exit through the carnival’s gates. Lamps die around the provisional camp as fires rise up near wagons. John sits alone before an unattended flame. It burns bright and strong. Meat roasts on large spit above. He turns a smooth stone over in his raised hand.
“Thinking about that choice?”
John looks up to see Boss standing beside him. He silently curses himself for not having spotted the giant’s approaching shadow.
“What’s there to think about?” he asks.
Boss drops to one knee beside John. He does not turn upon the young man, instead his sight drives into the crackling flames.
“The issue of killing a man ain’t a simple thing.”
“He’s not the first I’ve killed.”
“Maybe not out of defense or mercy,” Boss replies, taking a seat beside the outsider and stretching out his monstrous legs, “but I recognize that look in your eyes when you pulled that trigger. I’ve seen it many times before, had it in my own many years ago. This was different.”
“You’re crazy.”
Boss doesn’t laugh or smile. His beaded eyes shine in the flickering bright. No carnies, performers, or traders surround them; only darkness, broken by faint light.
“I started running this show eight years ago. We’ve been on the road for three. Before that, you could say my life didn’t have much direction. I laid rail a few years before this, but I didn’t spend much time on the line.”
He withdraws his hatchet and leans back against the cut logs that serve as seats around the campfire. The silver blade swirls reflections of orange and yellow.
“I cut a man’s throat when I was thirteen. Tobias Sanders was his name. He wasn’t a very bad man, just talked too much. Borrowed too much. Talked a big game but could never pay his dues. He’d been warned what would happen but he didn’t listen.”
Boss turns his hatchet over in his tanned hands.
“That excuse served me well over my next twenty years, helped me get to sleep the nights I went out clean and came back with bloodied hands, but it was all lies. I killed men because there was something dark and vile in me and I let it run for far too long. Hell, I ran with it.”
Boss jerks his head in the direction of the wagons that litter the roadside.
“The people that work for me, they’re like my children. And I’ll protect them from men like ones we put down today. I’ll protect them from men like myself,” he says, pointing to the revolvers John carries, “From men like you.”
“I don’t enjoy what I do, Boss, but it needs to be done.”
Boss chuckles. “You know, I know the story of the Riders, how they began. Noble goals. Wanted to stop evil men; men who’d hurt others, men who’d run from their responsibilities. They weren’t bad men in the start. But there was one who poisoned the bunch. That’s the way it always is. They became convinced that what they did was virtuous and true.”
John leaps to his feet and hurls the rock he carries into the fire. Sparks flare up around the two men.
“Don’t you dare compare me to them! They hunted men! Slaughtered families!”
“Not at first.”
“The man I killed was not a deserter or a man who stole, he was a killer. A rapist! He was proud of it!”
“The Riders hunted killers. Still do. The Riders hunt the destroyers of homes,” Boss says, rising to his feet, “That’s the funny about evil, John, it has so many forms.”
“I only need to kill one man.”
“Right, the man today was just practice.”
John’s rakes his hands through unkempt hair. He spits into dirt.
“That was different.”
“How exactly?”
The words come before John can swallow them.
“Because he hurt her.”
John stops. He bows his head and speaks no more. Boss wipes the dust from his work pants, his hands. He drags a massive boot through the sand and kicks up a mound onto the fire, again and again, until the flames die.
“The road you’ve taken, there’s a lot of death along its stops,” he says, “The men I’ve killed….I remember their faces. Even if I never knew their names, I remember their faces. And so will you, John.”
Boss flips the hatchet in his hands and holds out the handle in the shine of dying embers. A line of notches make their way down the frame.
“Just like me, you’ll carry them.”
He returns the hatchet to its sheath and makes his way to the campfires that burn beyond.
“I don’t want you alone out here, John. Not right now. You need to be with people. Mingle with the others.”

* * *

Prince lifts his feet up on the cotton sheets that stretch tight across the queen bed of the rented room, John’s one-night residence. His shirt sits neatly folded on the chipped nightstand beside him, his poncho hanging from the coat rack near the entrance. His revolvers rest in the holsters at his waist. With his prey upon the Black Rail he’ll need all his senses rested for the hunt.
There comes a knock upon the door. Prince doesn’t reach for his weapons. He shuts his eyes and calls out.
“Enter.”
The door swings open and the prostitute in purple garters steps inside. As she shuts the door, her voice takes on the same squeaking, bubbly tone that failed to charm the room’s former occupant.
“Leonard said you were looking for company?”
“For your services,” Prince corrects, “Not your company.”
“Long as you pay you can call it whatever you want, honey.”
Prince shrugs, he nods to the area where his shirt lays.
“Bills are inside the front pocket. Try not to wrinkle it too much.”
The girl reaches carefully into the shirt pocket and withdraws a small handful of bills.
“You got too much here.”
Prince smiles. “Just testing you,” he says, “You’d be surprised how many people try to cheat a blind man.”
The girl lets out a squeaky laugh as she slips the appropriate number of bills into her slick stockings. She slides along the length of the bed, taking a seat on the edge beside Prince. She touches his cheek with the tip of her painted nails.
“And you don’t care much for that, do you?”
Prince reaches up and catches her hand with sudden force, but his fingers wrap lightly around her delicate wrist.
“Enough with that voice.”
“Lot of men like it.”
“I don’t.”
“Alright,” the girl replies, her voice dropping in octave to a bearable degree.
Prince sits up and breathes in her scent. Her straw-like hair flutters across his scarred eyes.
“My eyes, they don’t scare you?”
The girl shoots Prince an inquisitive glance.
“Honey, you don’t look like the monster you seem to think you are.”
“Maybe not in looks.”
The two kiss.
“You’re not wearing perfume,” Prince says.
“Is that a problem?”
“Quite the contrary.”

* * *

Boss and John make their way to fire pits where the carnies, traders, and performers all wait. Gathered round one campfire are Mal and Cyrus, an odd pairing, their conversation cut short by the giant and stranger’s approach. Michael sits with his back turned to the flame as Harrison threads a needle and pushes it into his skin, stitching the second half of the through-and-through shoulder wound the scarred Rider so graciously bestowed. Alexander sits beside his wife and tenderly strokes her bruised cheek. He rises at their approach.
“You son of a bitch,” he mutters, racing up to meet them.
“Alexander—” Boss begins, explanation interrupted as Alexander throws a right hook upward which strikes him across the jaw. His head lifts with the force but he doesn’t fall, doesn’t even step back.
Alexander grunts with frustration and pain, clutching his bruised knuckle and stepping back towards the fire.
“Goddamn tree,” he screams, “You let me go on fixing coffins while my wife was being assaulted!”
“Selina’s fine, Alexander, barely a scratch on her,” Cyrus remarks.
“You best shut your mouth, Cyrus,” the coffin maker replies, “This here is between me and Boss.”
The giant rubs a hand across his scuffed jaw and speaks. “He has a point, Alexander, you would’ve done more harm than good out there.”
“You didn’t even tell me what was going on till the moment you drug those corpses into my tent! She’s my wife, Boss, I’m supposed to keep her safe!”
“Listen to yourself, Alexander. Having you there would’ve put Selina even further in harm’s way.”
Alexander scoffs the giant’s words and motions in John’s direction.
“And yet some stranger wanders into our camp half dead with guns on his hips and you put him on guard duty!”
Boss steps forward to tower over the coffin maker. Despite the impressive bulk that shadows his thin form, Alexander doesn’t flinch under the anger that builds in the giant’s voice. His eyes stare straight into Boss’s beaded orbs.
“You listen here, son. This is my circuit. My show. You’re my family, and I love you all, but that don’t mean I won’t beat the piss out of you on account of insubordination.”
He points a massive thumb back at John.
“Without that ‘stranger’, Selina’d probably be dead.”
Michael calls out from beyond the fire, his words punctuated by sharp intakes of breath as Harrison pulls his stitches tight. “Hey, I was the one who lit the fireworks!”
Boss and Alexander both turn to face the wounded carnie. Before they can speak a voice silences them; Selina’s words.
“Oh will you all just stop!”
She rises up from her seat and makes her way to center stage, pushing between the sparring men, her form dwarfed by both. Her short arms hold the two apart.
“No need to keep comparing your peckers, you’re both right! Boss, you should’ve sent someone to tell my husband I was in danger—”
She holds up one finger to stop the word’s before they can exit the giant’s lips. She turns her authority on her husband next.
“Alexander, I love you. You’re level-headed in just about everything a man can be level-headed in. You’ve got no qualms with hurling yourself in front of a bullet to save anyone here, but you ain’t smart when it comes to me. You know that.”
The two flustered men relax. Fists drop. Shoulders sag. Selina lowers her arms and looks to the stranger among them.
“You helped save my life, John,” she says, “We’re even, but silence ain’t a luxury we can afford you anymore. You got some explaining to do.”
“Hey what about—”
“Yes Michael, what you did with the fireworks was great.”

* * *

“—and my father was a salesman too.”
“I don’t recall asking you your life story, Cyrus.”
“Yeah, well, you got it, John, long as you keep your trap shot about the reasons as to why we found you with one foot in the grave and anxious to be used as road filling.”
John draws a hand down his frustrated face and cocks an eye towards Mal, the silent collaborator to Cyrus’s loquacious being. Mal simply shrugs.
“He’s not going to help you, son. You’re listening to this tale till you suspend my words with your own,” Cyrus remarks, punching Mal’s shoulder with a hearty chuckle the fire breather refuses to share, “Anyways…my father was a salesman, and my mother was an unhappily married woman, naturally. They met when my father stopped by my mother’s home on a sales tour and after a night of steamy passion I was conceived. Nine months later, I was born, my mother was abandoned, and my father was in Alabama inebriated beyond his earthly station.”
“That’s a terrible love story,” John mutters.
Cyrus smiles. “Whoever said it was a love story? It’s just a story of life, John, and love’s got nothing to do with it. Love is born of pain and hardship and misguided passion. That’s how it was with my mother and father, that’s how it was with Alexander and Selina—”
“Careful, Cy,” Selina calls.
“—my past wife, Celia, and myself, Michael and whatever girl is desperate enough to lay with him—”
“What?”
“—and I’m sure you and whatever girl you have back home can agree with this.”
John lifts up a hand and stops the slew of words spilling from the salesman’s mouth.
“You need to stop now, Cy.”
“Calling me Cy now, are we?”
“Calling you whatever I need to get you to stop talking.”
Michael and Harrison share a laugh at John’s slight. Michael’s ends in a grunt as Harrison pulls the final stitch tight and cuts the thread with his teeth. Selina reaches over past Alexander and pats her wounded protector on the top of his head. Blood fills his cheeks.
“Can’t we just stop drilling each other? Can’t we just be happy no one was hurt?” Cyrus asks. His words garner a cold stare from Michael, “Seriously hurt, I mean to say. We should thank God for that.”
John lets out a dark chuckle that silences the entire band. The crackle of the campfire beats the stillness.
“Why should we thank God for that?” he asks, scanning the curious faces, “Answer me that. Why do we have to thank Him for not taking someone we love?”
He stands and points to the coffin maker, “Why should Alexander thank God that his wife was only beaten and assaulted, not raped and murdered? He’s almighty! He put us in that situation! Michael shouldn’t have had to be shot; God should have stopped the bullet.”
“John—” Selina begins but he cuts down her soft protest.
“I ask myself every minute of every day why He lets the world He created be shadowed by darkness and despair and pain and misery. And don’t you dare tell me it’s because we must be tested, or that The Lord works in mysterious ways, that’s just making excuses for a being above us all. He shouldn’t need excuses.”
John stands slowly, his gaunt face twisting in the light of the flames, an ever-changing mask of pain.
“You want to know why these things happened? It’s because there is no God. And if there is, it’s because he’s an evil son of a bitch, as evil as the men who attacked Selina and the men I hunt.”
His eyes draw down to the holstered revolvers that lie on the makeshift seat. He turns his sight among each member of the strange band before him.
“Where do you think we go when we die? You think we go to some better place, some paradise? I used to believe that. Where do you think the monsters of this world go?”
It is Alexander, surprisingly, who answers the call.
“They go to Hell, John.”
John’s laugh raises hair upon the skin of those who hear it; an empty, hopeless sound.
“Hell?” he says, “We’re in Hell, Alexander. And the men you don’t bury, with no loved ones to lay them in the earth, they just take a new form. You know where Lucifer fell when he was cast out of Paradise? He fell to Earth. That’s where he remains. Hell isn’t fire and brimstone, it’s dust and sand and things that once brought light now dimmed.”
A hush follows John’s tirade. No other dares speak. No other dares follow. Except one.
“You aren’t the one who’s seen Hell, John.”
Mal’s eyes echo the same pain that the stranger’s hold.
“1870. Winter. Not winter like we have it here. No, feet of snow, nearly swallowed you. Chilled the bone and clung to the skin. My brother and I were nine. We were born in a small barn, hidden in the hay and stolen away when found. My brother and I were sold to the same man. I thought we were lucky, at least we were still together.”
Mal shudders. He draws his flint across the ground in a sudden jerk of spark.
“But at that age, you aren’t strong enough to work. You cook and clean, best you can, but they found other uses for us.”
“My God, Mal.”
Selina rises from her seat and taking a seat beside the fire breather. She rests a hand upon the introvert’s arm. The mouths of the others drop the slightest hint when Mal doesn’t shrug away from her touch.
“Luke was all I had. He was my best friend. Only friend, pathetic as that might be. The only other children on the farm were our master’s spawn, and they weren’t inclined to befriend us. One day we were taken into town, an oddity since we never went into town with the master, only with his wife to carry ingredients she purchased. We went with him and his only boy. I remember that his son had this queer smile on his face the whole time, kept looking back at me and Luke. We were led into a bar, me and my brother, and moved into separate rooms. The men came then.”
Mal’s face draws flat like slate.
“My brother’s face was just like mine. We were twins,” he says, pointing to the skin on his cheek malformed by old burns, “I had this done to me for trying to run the day we were purchased. Master only had to do it to one of us. Every day I’d feel it and every day Luke would see it.”
His finger traces the path of the burn.
“Because of this, Lake always had more callers. He was a profitable investment. I remember the rooms we were in, built for one purpose. No pictures. No furniture. Just a bed and sheets. No pillows, no headboard, like it’d been made just for us and nothing more. I’d sit there in that empty room and listen to the sounds through the walls. The grunts. The screams. The cries. But there was one man who fancied me, name of Collins, had me every day the master brought us. The thing you wouldn’t believe was that he was a handsome man. No scars. No deformities. Brilliant blue eyes, fair skin, blonde hair. He was like an angel.”
Mal chuckles and draws forth the flint from his back pocket. It rolls in the pit of his palm, trapped by the pocket of flesh.
“And that just made what he did all the worse,” he mutters, “He didn’t cut me, didn’t beat me, never laid a heavy hand upon me, and that’s the part of him that scared me the most, how civil it all was.”
Mal shakes his head, “He even cried when he’d finished, said he was sorry, tears coming out of those big blues, but he always came back. Always. Collins was special. A rich man, government man, prestigious enough to warrant a discount from my owner. My master had big plans for Collins’ influence and he needed him satisfied. Collins had a flask and a Colt he kept in a holster by the bed. Only man my master trusted enough to let that fact slide. And I used that fact to my gain.
“There was a matchbook I’d found lying under the furnace in my master’s home, just a few sticks left. He must’ve kicked them under and never bothered to get down on his knees to retrieve them. I kept the book in my overalls. I always stripped after Collins. That was his only caveat. He liked to watch. I waited until he’d gotten his shirt pulled over his head when I went for the colt and the bottle. I unscrewed the flask and splashed it over his face. My hands were shaking the whole time. I held the revolver on him but I couldn’t fire, I had to save the bullets. I didn’t fumble with the matches though.
“The first one caught flame right away. I remember the look on Collins’s face when he saw me lift the match over my head. He didn’t try and grab my hand. He didn’t beg for mercy or curse my name. He just…stood there, almost like he’d been expecting it.”
Mal flicks his hand forward, letting his flint bounce down along his knee and to the ground.
“Then I threw it. As soon as Collins lit up I ran, didn’t stop to watch him burn. He didn’t scream, kept his tongue pulled back, maybe he thought he owed me that, I don’t know. I made my way out the room and into the adjacent where Luke was staying. We were on the second floor so the men below didn’t smell Collins yet. Door was open. I kept Collins’ pistol raised the whole time. Luke was on the other side with his caller. The man was still inside my brother when I shot him in the throat. Luke knew better than to scream. He dressed while I stood in the doorway watching the stairs. My master and his boy came up first. I had my sights on them before they could draw. I didn’t kill them. No, I didn’t need to.
“My master’s son was still smiling when I took his manhood with the bullet. Took his father’s next. Then we ran. No one gave chase at first. No one drew on us. They just stood and watched while two little Negro boys covered in blood made their escape. Probably too shocked to realize what was happening.”
The fire shifts as Mal throws a new set of wood onto the shrinking flame.
“The snow was deep that day, up to our hips. So cold in those rags we wore. We made our way through the alley and out into the field that separated the town from the woods beyond. We’d nearly reached the woods when we heard the dogs. We were lucky. They moved slow, couldn’t find us. I held Luke’s hand and kept him close the whole time we were going. Had no idea where to go, just knew we needed to go north. North was freedom.
“We kept at it for days in the snow and the cold. It was getting harder to move. So hungry. I had the pistol and just a few matches left in the box for fires. Tried to hunt but could never hit anything. I could hear Luke coughing with each step he took. That cold got in his lungs. We were alone and starving and so cold. I could see my ribs. Count them. Feel the space in between them. The last day my brother was alive, he was lying by a pitiful fire, so gone he didn’t even shiver.
“I told him I was sorry, that I should’ve waited for the summer to run, stolen clothes, tried for a horse, anything. Luke said he wouldn’t have made it till then. He was proud of me, what I did. He wanted to be gone. I offered him the last bullet in the gun but he told me no. He said he wanted me to remember him the way he’d always been in the end, that he wanted me to live no matter what. He made that part clear. I held my brother’s hand as the frost finally took him. And in that dark and cold place I found my Hell.
“I took a branch and sharpened it. Had to get it sharp; enough to cut flesh. Got a fire going using the gunpowder in the last bullet to spark, knew I couldn’t hit anything with it.”
Mal rubs the back of his hand across dried lips.
“It wasn’t like cutting meat or skinning a buck or anything like that. It wasn’t that the skin is tougher, the branch did its job even with the cold. Cutting Luke was like I was cutting myself. Cutting into my soul, as it were. I didn’t close his eyes. For what I was doing, what I had to do, I couldn’t close his eyes. I needed to see them, needed to feel that hurt. I cut from his calf, where there was still something left. The fire took care of the rest.”
Mal meets John’s gaze. He rises from his seat and returns the flint to his pocket.
“Fire saved my life, John. It burned Collins. It kept me warm. It cooked the meat that kept me from death. It also took me to the deepest Hell I’d ever known and ever will know. It’s why I do what I do. You respect it, you mold it, and you release it. It’s not always what the wicked see when they die. Sometimes it’s just the opposite. I see Luke every time the nightmares come. Who do you see?”
“I see Rose.”
“That’s all I need to know."
Mal steps over the log seat and exits towards the wagons.
“I’m calling it a night.”