Mortals (98 page)

Piercing whistles sounded from behind him. That was good news. Of course they didn’t know he couldn’t respond, if that was what they were looking for.

He was thinking odd things. He remembered the faces of the librarians in his life, especially the ones from his youth, with peculiar definiteness and clarity, compared to, say, the faces of tradesmen, the postmen, or even the teachers whose hands he had passed through, whose faces he
had stared directly at for hours on end. He was thinking odd things. Quartus had roan-red axillary hair and he was thinking that in his life he had never before seen truly red armpit hair. He couldn’t believe his life experience had been so limited. But there it was. It had. So he was going to have to kill a unique specimen, unique as far as he was concerned.

The whistling was closer and more urgent. It meant that his comrades were on the move, coming. He wanted his brother to come back from the dead and whistle for him, whistle anything.

The people under his control didn’t like the whistling. The group as a whole was responding as a single organism. It was stiff, stiffer. They probably had their own repertoire of whistles, signaling-whistles.

Little things were going on that he had no time for. The tarpaulin over the cots and the radio set was in flames, adding to the merriment.

His captives were all looking at him out of the sides of their eyes. There was more smoke coming in their direction. He began to cough.

The boy stood on the burning deck, he thought. He could smell mutiny among his captives.

They had to believe he would kill them.

He knew what he had to think, or rather not think but be, and he could do it. He had to be Satan, he had to be Satan saying
Evil, be thou my good
, Book Four. He tried to inhale this thought.

Abruptly, Quartus stood up and ran at Ray.

“I am going to kill you, you poefter,”
he screamed, astonishingly to Ray, ignoring the gun in his face and grasping at the packet on Ray’s chest, this time, flinging himself fully against Ray and trying to do something clever. He was trying to twist the neck tapes into a noose, trying to detach the packet from its main bindings around the back, and strangle Ray in the neck bindings by twisting the packet around and around. But his fingers were slippery with blood and Ray saw what he was trying to do and got the gun barrel up into Quartus’s stomach, which calmed the man.

Quartus fell away from him. He fell on his side and then sat up.

They glared at each other.

“Go back with them,”
Ray said. He wanted them all in one place again, his enemies, all compact. This time he would kill them if anyone forced his hand. He could do it. It had helped him, surviving Quartus’s best efforts. Helped his resolve. He had reserved the power to kill them and he hoped they would see that that made him more formidable. He could take a minute to congratulate himself so far. He was a leaning tower but he was still in charge. One thing that had helped him defeat Quartus had
been his nakedness. His legs, his body, everything was slick with nervous sweat. So there had been utility in his madness, if not method, exactly. And Quartus had not helped himself in the struggle by being drunk. He had been drunk. He had smelled of alcohol. And he had been erratic. But it was true that groups like these drank just routinely.

“You, you go back,”
he said again. Quartus was stirring but not really moving.

Ray had the right to pause, to rest. That was the way he felt. There was the view. He was seeing more death in the landscape than he had when he’d looked before, dead bodies in different shapes, more of them against the ground, here and there. From the sky, they would look like dots and commas, like seeds.

I am going to have to summon my friends right away, he thought. And fortunately he knew exactly what to say, which was Tla kwano, Come here. But unfortunately he was hoarse. His friends needed a sign.

“Tla kwano,” he said, testing his voice. It was feeble. He cleared his throat and tried it again.

He was making mistakes. The incorrigible Quartus said,
“Oh I shall come to you, my man …”

“I wasn’t talking to you, meneer. Go back with your lackeys
.

“None of you move,”
he screamed at the lackeys.

It had not been helpful being Satan, thinking
Evil, be thou my good
, he didn’t know why. He was not well. He was not doing well.

He realized that Mokopa had sent him off without a spare banana clip for his rifle, which implied that Mokopa had assumed he was probably going to be a burnt offering and that however it went it would be a spasm event and not something involving extended firing. That is, they had thought he would do what he could do and they would follow on and that would be it. He didn’t blame them. He had half a magazine left, enough. So that was what Mokopa had thought and now there was the fire.

He didn’t want the building to burn. He didn’t want various things to happen. And he had to shoot, because Quartus was doing something, rolling over and over in his direction, rolling over and over like a log, rolling across the ten feet separating them. It made no sense. Ray fired, uselessly, striking the space that the demonic Quartus had already traversed.

Quartus was at him, he had him by the legs and was trying to pull him down, and even worse, Ray realized, the man was biting his right leg, in fact. Rage and disgust transformed him.

It was too much. Ray had been unprepared because Quartus’s rolling
over and over like a log had not been a normal aggressive act. It had been something else, an invention.

Ray roared at Quartus. He
would not allow it
, what was going on, let alone just being touched by the animal Quartus. He unslung his rifle and, gripping it with both hands, raised it over his head and brought it down like a spear, driving the barrel into Quartus’s bare shoulder, tearing the flesh. It was not enough. Quartus was keeping on, like an animal. He was trying to pull Ray down. Quartus was strong.

Again Ray raised the gun and brought it down with all his force but to the right of the previous wound he had inflicted. It was weak of him and he should have deepened the original wound but it was not something he could do. There was a fresh new wound, anyway. There was blood, plenty of it.

Ray was in danger of being capsized, dragged over, despite what he had done to Quartus, but then he wasn’t and he could see why. He had hurt something in Quartus’s left arm enough to make it weaken almost to the point of not participating. Quartus couldn’t grip hard with it, claw at him with it. Ray was able to kick his right leg free. He was winning.

He was okay. There was something he wanted to say but he didn’t know what it was, except that he wanted to say it to his wife. Ray brought the gun down again, but this time Quartus had gotten out of the way, like a snake, an eel. He was half lying down, injured.

Ray steadied himself and brought his attention back as he had to and as well as he could to the huddled masses of the enemy yearning to be free and kill him, dismember him. He got his gun around properly and put two rounds into the space between them. They were restless. A couple of them were on all fours instead of lying obediently flat. They are restless, the natives are restless, he thought, and these were not conscripts, which was important. All present and reporting were bona fide volunteers. Quartus was lying doubled over. He was touching his wounds. All was well.

He hoped his enemies had seen that he was learning to be more tender with the trigger of his murder machine. He was getting the hang of it. He was being less profligate with his ammunition. He would have enough for everything.

But Quartus was on his knees suddenly, looking like he wanted something from Ray. And almost immediately then Quartus was diving at him, at his legs, again.

It was the same but not the same. Quartus was crawling up him violently. Ray now had the weapon in aiming mode, for the benefit of the
foot soldiers, so he had to maintain this and strike to the side without compromising his stance. He caught Quartus on the neck with the stock of the gun, ineffectively, and then struck a glancing blow that grazed Quartus’s forehead, again ineffectively. He was going to have to kill the man, if this kept up. It was then that Quartus bit his bad knee, his swollen bad knee, giving Ray more pain than he had suffered from all Quartus’s previous efforts.

He wanted to kick Quartus to death with his better leg, the free leg. He tried it. He tried to kick Quartus hard enough to break something. But he wasn’t in the right posture to put his full force into it.

“I am going to fucking kill you if you don’t stop,”
he shouted, hearing the hollowness in his own voice, kicking him again.

But he meant it. He was willing to do it, kill a bleeding man.

Quartus had his arms around Ray’s right ankle. Ray stepped back. He stabbed the muzzle of the rifle into Quartus’s cheek. He wasn’t sure what Quartus was doing or what he was understanding. Except of course that he had to not like what his men were seeing.

Ray said again,
“Understand me, I am going to kill you if you don’t stop.”

The two fires he needed to pay attention to were the one behind him and the little one in the lean- to over the cots and the radio set. Fire went badly with ammunition stocks. He had to keep his mind on too many things.

His legs were trembling. His enemies could see that, which was bad. And he could see that both his knees were bleeding, weakly but definitely. And he had to wonder about what foul germs the dog Quartus with his prominent canines had put into him.

Quartus plunged at Ray yet again, aiming for the knees, making a plaintive sound. Ray jumped back but not quickly enough.

Quartus had Ray’s penis in his grasp. He had it with both hands. He was dragging at it and twisting. There was white pain all through Ray. It was unbearable and it was unfair. He was already fighting faintness.

I am killing you now
, he thought.

He fired down, with the gun barrel touching Quartus on the hip.
This is what you get
, he thought.

Quartus screamed and let go. His jodhpurs were filling with blood, one leg of them was.

It seemed nothing could make Quartus lie still or be quiet. He was making animal sounds. His men were showing signs of doing something and they had to be stopped. Quartus had tried to damage him. He was still trying to swallow the pain.

He had put too many rounds into Quartus. He had wanted to cripple him, mainly, but he had been willing to kill him, and now he was bleeding to death.

Quartus was jerking around. It was pitiful. He had done it. He had shredded the man’s hip. He was deluging blood. It was coming out and staining the pebbles and it was making Ray sick.

It was unnatural not to want to help the dying man, if he was dying, and he probably was. He wanted to get help for the fucking stupid man. There was nothing he could do. He wanted Morel to appear and help. He prayed to God Morel would appear. Because he had been damaged, he was afraid. He was afraid the fucker had hurt his penis beyond just hurting it, actually damaging it.

Quartus’s men wanted to help him too. They were getting to their knees, up on their knees. He couldn’t blame them.

“Get down,”
he said. They were moving around too freely, and he was in hell.

He gathered himself and shouted something to the effect that they should do something, sit down, it was glossolalia, really, just blurts of sound, pleading sound.

Quartus was writhing around, still. He was making small sounds.

An episode of black smoke began, obscuring everything. He got down on his knees. He didn’t know which was worse, standing or kneeling.

He was through killing now, if he could help it.

Piercing whistling rose and twined together into something hard and terrible, and then his friends were there, thrusting through the smoke, Mokopa, Kevin, everyone.

They were firing everywhere.

He wanted to explain what he had done, but there was no time.

He wanted to tell them he needed to speak to someone because he had killed someone. But there was killing going on.

He wanted to explain that they had obeyed, Quartus’s men, they had been okay.

He put his rifle down and relaxed onto his side.

He wanted his wife. He wanted to explain.

Confusion was expanding around him and in his weakness he wanted to wave it on like a traffic cop directing things. He wanted to wave it on to encourage it so it could go where it had to so that he could rest. He was already resting. He wanted to sleep more than anything he had ever wanted he could think of. But the confusion had his blessing, was the way he felt.

Shyness, for the first time, covered him, for his penis. He wanted to shield his shy penis with something if he could find anything. He was on his side, pressing his penis back in between his clasped legs. He could feel the pebbles burning a design of their own into the flesh of his side. It was his fate to be marked. Later he would see what the design of his life would be.

He was fading, and then Kevin, his friend, was there, crouching beside him and touching him. He felt better immediately. His friends were jumping through the smoke, howling.

This is it, he kept thinking.

There was the feeling that this was it, that this was the world, the world was what he was seeing. He was seeing his friends arriving shooting and the villains jumping up and scattering, disobedient villains.

Come, Satan, he thought, waving his arms.

And then he was seeing one of his friends tearing the burning tarpaulin free and winding it into a manageable burning mass and hurling that off the side of the building and then finding himself burning, his clothes, and then dropping down and rolling around in a way that reminded him of Quartus rolling around.

It was hard to participate, lying down, but thank God for his friend Kevin. But he was seeing something. And it was the world, it was one of his friends, his witdoeke friends, doing almost a circus act tearing out and crushing against his chest the flaming tarpaulin and then hurling it over the side and managing to crush the flaming thing into a mass he could fling high out into the air and over the side. And then he knew it was over for him, he was seeing things twice. He had seen the same thing twice. He was afraid.