R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

I’ve seen the look enough to instantly recognize it by now. So I usually grin and pull a fin out of my wallet. Information becomes real cheap real quick after a smack or two.

Now I know you like to think you’re like me, but you’re not. Not if you’re reading this you’re not. If you met me, you would take the five, cough up your honour, and count your blessings. Nurse your wounded ego with a bag of Doritos or something.

Everyone but everyone knows that readers are pussies. I had assumed Johnny Dinkfingers was my natural opponent, so I had squared my stance with reference to him. But Reverend Nill, perhaps seized by some instinct for initiative, beat me to the punch, so to speak.

He kind of sidled into my space, catching me off guard in a way that baffles me to this very day. His features became little more than a mob of angry extras about the leading role of his mad white glare. Somehow I knew things weren’t going to deteriorate into violence-not physical violence. Not at this moment, anyway. Somehow I knew something stranger, something worse, was about to happen.

He leaned in close-smooch close. He was about four inches shorter than me, so he had to bend his face back to better wire his gaze into my own. And wire them together he did. An arc-welder look. A heartbeat had passed, less, and yet in that time the church backyard, the encircling fence of strangers, even the afternoon sky blew away like smoke.

Just Nill staring, leaning into me with chimpanzee rage.

Without warning, he raised his hands to his chest and began drumming-fucking drumming!-this primal beat. Then, his pupils soldered to the centre of my attention, the veins across his temple pulsing, he began to chant-a kind of rap, only infused with adrenalin and rage.

“God loves!”he began rasping. “Those who hate!”

His breath smelled like expensive cheese.

“Since Adam! Since Eve! Since the dawn of fate!”

And on it went. A litany of all the individuals and peoples cursed and destroyed in the Bible.

Cain. The heroes and monsters who brought about the Flood. Esau. Sodom and Gomorrah.

“As He rains fire on the Sodomite!

So He exterminates the Canaanite!”

The work of a vengeful God, a bloodthirsty God, one who punished virtue and rewarded deception. A God who chose some over others, and who delivered victims to the righteous in a pageant as long as history itself.

It was surreal. Vicious in a way that I really can’t describe. His look, Maori wide and unflinching, seemed the very eyes of Judgment. His face, red with feral intensity, seemed a topographical map of hell. And his voice, scarcely human, a fist knotted about ten thousand strands of hatred.

On and on he went, to the staccato beat of palms against his chest… Boom-shicka-boom.

Glaring at me like an evil hypnotist.

Describing all the poor bastards obliterated by the Christian God of Love.

It seemed I was next. “You. Have got. To be fucking kidding me…”

This was Molly. All this time she’d been as nervous as a lone hottie stranded in line with a bunch of hairy old truck drivers at the DMV. Now she stood there, her red hair aflame in the evening sunlight, staring at Nill with dumbfounded disgust. “What? Are you a fucking psycho or something, Reverend? Huh? I mean. Come. Fucking. On. What kind of goof does that?”

And somehow I just knew that pretty much every word she said was digestible…

Except goof.

It’s a prison thing.

“Goof?” Nill replied, twisting two fingers against his temple. “Psycho? What do you think happens when God-the God Almighty-lands in your brain? You think you stay sane? Read your Bible, bitch. All his vessels crack. All of ‘em!”

“Some,” Molly said, “apparently more than others.”

“Manners,” Nill grated. “Manners, Missy! The Good Lord has a way of teaching them!” He glanced at the hulking shadow of Johnny Dinkfingers, who almost instantly stepped forward, his hand drawn back for a bitch-slap…

And my reflexes took over. Johnny Dinkfingers was no pussy. He was big, surprisingly fit and fast, and, perhaps more importantly, he was hard.. Prison teaches you that a straight line runs through every violent encounter. If you fail to find and to follow it, you will be maimed or dead. Ex-cons tend not to fuck around.

Mr. Dinkfingers was all these things and mean besides. But the sad truth was that he simply did not stand a chance.

Those of you with any long-standing involvement in sports know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you still fool yourself into thinking otherwise. I have heard no fewer than 3,687 fuckers claim, in this way or that, they were “ass-kickers.” Of those, only 16 or so were credible: real ass-kickers tend not to talk about kicking ass all that much (though with all this MMA crap I seem to hear it more and more).

See, if you play a sport, you have an inkling of just how vast the difference in skill and strength can be between players. Now take that inkling and apply it to combat, and you have a sense of just how unlike the movies real fights are. Trust me: you do not ever-ever-want to find yourself in the ring with someone like me.

There was simply no way I could ever gain the trust of these fuckers the way things stood, even if I had five years and wept at the mere mention of Herr Hitler. I was too clever, too arrogant, and just too damn good-looking to ever really be trusted by men like these. So I had to reach for the next best tool in my tool box: fear. Not that these guys were going to go all wobbly in the knees when they saw me in the street-not by a long shot. But they had done time, which meant that criminal paranoia was stamped as deep as a sex change into them. Cops, you see, have procedures, all kinds of rules that make them fluffy and cute so long as you don’t stumble into their sights-in which case they can bring the hammer down hard. But me? I was an unknown. And in a few moments I was about to become an unknown who could not be intimidated or otherwise bargained with-and who could kick some serious ass.

Atrained unknown.

I was about to become the big Who-the-fuck? in the marrow of their little world. The harbinger, baby.

And I had come bearing a gift-a simple feeling, one that said, I dunno but we gotta do something…

Something!

And something always leaves tracks. I caught the arm swinging toward Molly-before she had even registered it, I think. I stepped into its lumbering arc, twisted and turned, drawing the big man around and down. He didn’t really have much choice, given that he was simply following his own momentum-coaxed along arcs of my design, of course.

Afterward, I simply stood as relaxed as before, doing my best to appear as though I hadn’t even moved. A little Jet Li drama never hurts, I’ve found, when the violence is secondary to the message.

“Now where I come from,” I said in a toke-sharing voice, “you never- never-hit a white woman…”

Tim gaped in abject horror. The other sheeple just stood blinking-a critical incident processing lag of some kind. Stupid Nazi fuckers. Even stunned, Johnny Dinkfingers rolled forward on his rump, reaching for his boot-a knife of some kind, I imagine. The world becomes a Yard when you’re an ex-con. You always come armed.

Some woman screamed-a latecomer to the party.

Only Reverend Nill seemed unaffected. He held out a hand to stop Johnny mid-motion then turned to me with a mild expression of disappointment, placid while his Angry Bitch wife cackled in drunken laughter. It was pretty fucking hilarious, if you thought about it.

“I thank you for coming,” the Good Reverend Nill said.

“Sure thing,” I replied, drawing a shell-shocked Molly away from the crowd. “What time were Sunday services?”