Norman Rush - Mortals

A new blast of gunfire shook the tank above him. He was shaking. He was looking at Kevin. A splinter had been driven into his neck. The tank had been struck at a lower level than before. The villains were improving their aim, getting it lower.

Kevin was cursing, which was a good sign, Ray hoped. Ray went to him. He wanted to be the one to pull the splinter out. He was afraid Kevin would be too abrupt about it and break it off or not get all of it out.

“Don’t touch it,” he said to Kevin. The boy was frightened. He could die, Ray thought.

Ray nipped the splinter with his thumb and all four fingers where it went into the boy’s neck. He didn’t know if it was more a shard or a splinter. It wasn’t really a splinter because it was bigger, it was the size of a what, a thing much thinner than a pencil but still not a splinter. The question was how far it had gone into this child’s neck.

“Close your eyes,” Ray said. He was being an automaton. Kevin obeyed.

Ray repeated himself. “Close your eyes,” he said even more forcefully as he pulled the splinter out, jerked it out, and pressed the wound closed.

“It’s fine, really is,” Ray said, feeling faint. It was a small wound, but it was bleeding a lot. An antiseptic was needed.

Kevin was being compliant.

Thank God it’s regular bleeding, not a vein, not an artery, so thank you sweet God, thanks a lot.

He was afraid to let go of the wound, but did.

They crawled toward the service shed, Kevin wiping at his wound.

He had to do something. He was being overwhelmed by the wrongness of things. And there was something else. What he was going to do had to be done soon, because he was not a black person and the sun he was getting on the roof, amplified by its white pebbled surface, was going to fry him. It would be beyond sunburn. He needed a hat. He needed his pants. He needed his shirt. He was an idiot. His dead skin would slough off like his brother’s, in the old days, in his youth.

It would be great if suddenly the sky were full of flying saucers, fleets of them, all the same size, metallic, confounding everyone, and then there would be a voice on the media the radio the television everything saying there was a person who was designated to say what should be done to fix up the wrongness of the world and it would be him. And maybe a beam would come down from one of them, the main one if there was a main one, and touch him and he would rise up, full of power.

He felt better than he had. He was going to be part of history. Somebody would be interested in this what, skirmish, these events, and he would be part of the story, some part of it. People found him terrifying, with his brother’s manuscript on his chest. He wanted to look terrifying. He stood up and shook himself. He was still going to be part of it. He was going to. No one was stopping him. And when the beam touched him he would have the power to turn any weapon every weapon of every kind including the most secret, most mountainous weapon into shit.

He stood up and stretched. He needed to look as tall as possible for what he was going to do. He was tired of hunching over.

It felt like all the witdoeke were shouting at him at once from various points around the position. “Lower yourself,” someone shouted. And they were giving shrieking whistling. It was a campaign to get him to get down and go into the shed. He had never mastered the art of sticking his fingers into his mouth in a certain way and producing a sound so piercing his mother would come and say to quit, immediately. His brother had. And his brother had refused to show him how it was done.

Kevin was in the shed. Ray wanted to follow, go in and say hello and shake hands. He wanted to say hello to the chief, assuming the chief was there and available. He thought, By now Kevin will have explained me, explained who I am, a bystander but on their side, a friend of Wemberg, a naked friend of Wemberg, all of that. The feeling of wanting to shake hands with everybody was something he had to stop. It made no sense.

He wanted to shake hands with the chief and he wanted the chief to be Kerekang, his friend Kerekang. He had to go in there.

The shed was a windowless crude squat structure built so low that it was impossible to stand up in it. There was light coming in from a long horizontal gap in the west wall, where the siding had been dislocated and wrenched downward to make a firing port. A witdoek was sighting his gun through it but not, Ray thanked God, firing. Because the sound of firing in the enclosed space of the shed would be enough to drive anyone insane, and he was already insane. He noticed something that made sense. Witdoeke in the shed had shredded cloth jammed into their ears, threads hanging down. That included the chief, with whom he wanted to have a chat.

I have to get out of here before they begin shooting, he thought. And that was because he wanted not to be deaf in his next life.

The chief was not Kerekang. He had a long face. He was about forty. He had one good eye and one half-shut, scarred eye. With his bare hand he was dabbing gasoline on Kevin’s splinter wound.

Kevin said something, indicating the chief. Mokopa, was what it had sounded like, which would no doubt be the chief’s nom de guerre. Kevin said it again. Ray didn’t know what mokopa meant. One guess would be that it meant an animal, a ferocious one. Ferocious creatures were popular when you were renaming yourself and getting into violent undertakings.

“Mokopa is the black snake, the long one, rra.”

“Dumela, rra,” the chief said, reaching to feel the packet on Ray’s chest. The man had terrible body odor. Someone in the shed did. Maybe everyone in the shed did. The chief was wearing a cowhide vest stained black under the arms and a pair of somebody else’s khaki slacks. They were huge on him. He wanted to lock away in his mind a decent description of this man. He was good at description, but he was apprehending people generically or in outline, not individually, because now fear was not letting him concentrate and also because he wanted to get as far away from this man’s effluvium as he could. These people were individuals, and when he arrived at writing about them someday he wanted to have distinct images. But he felt he had to get out of the shed immediately and get on with his plan, such as it was.

He could see that what they were doing was making gasoline bombs, Molotov cocktails. They were decanting gasoline into Castle lager bottles and then stuffing torn-up cloth wicks into the mouths. They had produced seven or so of them. The enterprise going on there constituted another good reason for him to exit and get on with his own plan, solo. It was dangerous, what they were doing. Some kind of spark and he could be an ingredient in a fireball. Also the shed was an oven.

Another witdoek came over and began investigating Ray’s packet, but too roughly. These friends were not realizing something. They were jerking at his packet and laughing. But they were overlooking something. His packaging was weakening if not yet unraveling, exactly. But it had a limited life span, like everything except rocks and sand and death itself, which went on forever, so far as anyone could tell. He could imagine a situation where he would be presenting himself as the terror of the earth and his bundle would come apart and reveal that he was terrifying everyone with pages and pages and pages of this and that, text, pages fluttering, flying around him like doves, the stupidest bird in the animal kingdom, if he remembered correctly. Already he was having to hold it together more. And there would be laughter, hideous. But in the shed everyone was accepting, no doubt thanks to Kevin, and that was nice, but it had to be adieu pretty soon. They were seeing him as an eccentric but good person of some sort. They trusted him. That was fine but he had to get out of there. The witdoeke were looking at each other, patronizing him kindly, evidently, so far as he could tell in this pocket of hell he was in. No one was looking at his penis.