R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

“Who hired you?” he croaked with what was left of his voice. “Was it Leighton? Or the Mexicans, huh? Who’re you working for?”

“Jonathan and Amanda Bonjour.”

Crazed laughter, dry, as if coughed through ropes rather than vocal cords. “And here I thought I was cold!” he chortled. “Look. I know, man, so you can drop the fucking act!”

Ah, I thought. So this was where it was hiding. The Law of Unintended Consequences always rears its hoary head at some point, and here it was, bright and shiny and as deep up my ass as always.

“Un. Fucking. Believable,” I said in disgust.

I had decided to be aggressive at the pig roast to provoke some kind of incriminating response from the mad Reverend. Well, I certainly succeeded in provoking a response. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem all that incriminating…

“You’refaming us!” the Nazi cried. “We know you were at Nashron with that pussy Nolen! We know that you’re pushing his buttons!”

“Huh?”

He laughed and cried and sneered all at once. “Wh-what kind of fucking fool do you take me for, man? If you’re not the one who planted all that shit, then who else could it fucking be?”

“That’s what the Bonjours are paying me to find out.”

“No! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

I paused at this. One of the worst things you can do to some people- apart from being wronged by them-is to witness them in a moment of abject weakness. Nill was pretty much a human craps table at this point. I had to be sure I had all my bets covered before rolling.

“Listen up, Reverend,” I said with a marvelling smile. “We have three ways we can play this. In the first, you shoot Molly and I shoot you in a place where it takes a long time to die, because afterward, I shit you not, I will make you scream enough to shame the entire white race. In the second, I simply shoot you, in the mouth if I can manage it, in the hope of knocking out your motor cortex, and so save Molly. In the third, you simply set the gun down, and me and Molly here leave…”

“Yeah?” He cried. His screech echoed through the tin-pot hollows. It’s always embarrassing when men cover weak hearts with crazed voices. “How-how can I trust you?”

I shrugged. “Because I’m a chronic weed smoker… I’m too much of a slacker to dig graves. And I get too paranoid to cope with all the police bullshit. Afraid that I’ll fuck up. Afraid they’ll find my weed.”

All true.

“Buh-because you smoke weed?”

So far we had exchanged all these words around the fact of my gun pointed at his face and his gun held to Molly’s cheek. I’ve lived a good chunk of my life in the company of guns, and yet I will never get over the way they seem to vanish in the course of this or that. Here’s this thing, this tool that has been exquisitely designed and manufactured to bring about brain death in large mammals, and in the course of joking or negotiating or simply pissing away the time, we completely forget this mortal truth, wave them around like fucking Xbox controllers.

“Look,” I said, allowing more than a little impatience to leak into my tone. I realized that I had simply assumed all of Nill’s cronies were dead. “If we both fold our hands, split the pot, then we both get to rewind the clock. I don’t have to answer for your dead buddies. You don’t have to answer for abducting Molls here. We leave, you bury your flock, tell the rest of the congregation that they left to avoid the media attention, whatever. Sometimes people move away. Sometimes you never hear from them again… “

Especially junkies. Hard to keep tabs on junkies. But I didn’t need to say this because Nill was telling himself the same thing already. His balls had slipped out of his boxers-no doubt about that. He was dangling.

Debating.

“Hard to shoot a porno with good intentions,” I said. “Show us some wood, brother.”

Everyone breathed real hard.

You spend your whole life building this persona, this no-shit-no- way-no-how illusion that you somehow manage to cling to even as you talk Jesus or push those grocery carts across the parking lot. Then you bump into me. There’s nothing like someone who really doesn’t give a fuck to remind you how dearly-how desperately-you love your skin.

His crazy-ass eyes wide and shining, Reverend Nill stepped back from Molls.

He stood naked at that instant, in his own eyes as much as mine. I have no doubt the spin-doctoring would be quick in coming, that he would mythologize everything that had happened this night, that he would remind himself he had buried dead men in secret places. But for the moment, he stood utterly revealed: a fool clinging to all he genuinely owned, his skin colour and his hate. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think of tagging him.

Molly slumped to her knees. We left him there, alone and shirtless in the pale fire of his one light. Molly held me, held me tight, as we stumbled through the dark. She did not cry. At some point Nill began ranting behind us, or reciting actually, crying out a guttural German I’m sure he didn’t understand-some old speech I remembered from the History Channel. Hitler at Nuremberg.

The empty factory roared in reply, roared with the absence of collective will. Hydradyne. Makers of whatever.

He was still shouting as we stepped out into the night.

We had no wheels, so we had no choice but to walk the ruined service road to Highway 3.

At some point my legs failed me. I skidded to the weeded dirt, to my knees.

I could hear her voice. Despite the tsunami of crashing memory…

Like calls to like, you see, when it comes to the mind. I had killed three men tonight-bad enough. But over the years I had killed others, and so there I was, killing them, killing all ofthem, all over again. Fawk.

“Disciple? Are you crying? Disciple? It’s okay. I’m okay!”

She didn’t understand.

It ain’t easy, being an abattoir. Once we reached the highway, I called a cab and we began walking back toward town to meet it. The thought that Dead Jennifer had walked precisely these steps occurred to me, but the noise of recent events made the observation inaudible. The cabbie, some local fat-ass, said nothing, though I’m pretty sure he noticed everything-the gash on Molly’s forehead, certainly. But I wasn’t worried. Cabbies have a way of saying nothing. Too jaded to be surprised, just like me.

Our argument didn’t start until we found ourselves at the motel.

“Look,” I finally said. “The question you need to ask is whether you want to send me to the can for fifteen to twenty…” I have some pretty savage instincts when it comes to self-preservation. I admit I suffered a dark thought or two for a moment, watching her balance my future against her sense of violation.

“But Nill-”

“Didn’t. Harm. A soul.”

“But-”

“You’re thinking in common sense terms: I saved your life, so I gotta be good. But the authorities won’t give a flying fuck why I killed those guys. All they’ll care about is the who. As far as they’re concerned, I’m the murderer. How? How? Because I’m the one who violated the state’s monopoly on deadly force.”

It all came down to turf.

She gawked at me with a look halfway between astonishment and indigestion. “What happened to you?” she cried. The stress had caught up to her by now, and she was crying freely. “How does someone get so, so… fucking cynical?”

The blood had started to flow from the cut on her forehead.

“They remember,” I said, daubing her brow with a tissue. “We need to get you to a doctor.” As it turned out, the nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away, in a town called Innis. We took my Golf because she said she wasn’t sure if her car insurance would cover me. Can you believe it?