Norman Rush - Mortals

His ears were ringing. It was astonishing to him that technology had failed to address the fucking deafening racket guns made.

He was noticing something important at the back of the shelter housing the two cots. His attention had been drawn there by Quartus, who had been glancing nervously in that direction. And the important something was a radio setup. There was an aerial mast sticking up. He had missed it. He felt stupid for having missed it.

I will blow it to hell, he thought. He crouched and aimed and fired and his bullets tore the thing to pieces. But he had used more ammunition than he’d intended, again. Quartus was screaming at him. That meant Ray had done a good thing.

It was too difficult keeping his menacing attention equally on Quartus where he was and the foot soldiers where they were.

“Come over here, now,” he shouted at Quartus. Quartus stood up. He seemed to be smiling about something.

“No, get down and crawl, meneer. Crawl to me.”

Quartus was wearing a tank top and jodhpurs. He loved jodhpurs, apparently. He was moving slowly. He was continuing to smirk. Ray didn’t like it.

Witdoeke should be on hand. He wanted to know why they hadn’t shown up. Something was amiss.

Ray looked back along the roof and saw instantly what the problem was. He was appalled. He couldn’t allow himself to look for more than a moment at the calamity developing behind him. It felt like a calamity, but possibly it was only going to develop into one.

There was a broken wall of fire stretching across the roof, the offspring of the Molotov cocktail blaze that had preceded his foray, a blaze that had seemed to be declining but that was now robust. He could see why Mokopa had probably been holding back on the Molotov cocktails. This was a tarred roof. There was tar under the pebbles. A fire had gotten going in the tar. It wasn’t a conflagration, at least not yet. No it was at the stage where if everybody cooperated it could be beaten out, villains and rebels together. The problem was the quantity and blackness of the smoke being generated. Tar was something used in wars to produce smoke screens.

So the fact was that his friends were in the dark about his accomplishments, which now that he thought about it pretty much resembled his situation in life, not that he had ever had that many friends. But you digress, he thought. So his friends were unaware of what he had accomplished in the enemy camp. It wasn’t right. It was too much. Too much is enough, he thought.

But at least Quartus was doing as he’d been told, crawling along the rooftop toward him like a dog. And he was a dog. Except that no man is a dog. And No Isle Is a Mainland was one of his dead brother’s gems. He was afraid. He was in peril. He was weakening. He had to perform strength. He wanted to wrap a towel around his waist in behalf of his penis. He couldn’t. He was fully occupied. There were no towels. This was not a locker room.

The witdoeke had no idea what he had accomplished. The dog Quartus crawling toward him knew. But everything was precarious because everything was precarious. All he had to offer, all he really had to offer, was his willingness to kill. They had to believe that, the villains did. He would do it. But he wanted to tell someone what he was going to have to do, to do soon. It was all over for his mock bomb, he knew that. He was sure all of the villains had figured that out. And here was the snake Quartus crawling toward his subordinates like a dog. And Quartus was saying something out of the side of his mouth. There was the word piel in what he was saying, whispering loudly, which Ray just happened to know meant penis, prick, in Afrikaans.

The witdoeke should be arriving, fast. They would like what they would find. There was plenty for them. There were at least two mortar tubes they could take and put to use and there were the shells with little fins on them like little fat goldfish, which had to be around somewhere, unless they had been used up. He didn’t know about that. There was booty. Come quick, boys and girls, and help me, he thought.

He motioned Quartus to lie down with the foot soldiers, but not among them, at the outer part of the cluster, nearest him, so that Quartus would kindly reduce the number of targets Ray had to be prepared to aim at from two to just one.

Quartus was still talking subtly. It had to stop. Quartus was whispering. He could die for that, if he kept it up.

Someone had to come to help. There was a ding or a thing going on deep in his body like the tickle that tells you twenty minutes before it happens that you are going to vomit. But this was about fainting. And there was the rub, because if it got any worse before he got help he was going to have to commit murder, kill everyone. The sun was to blame. It was the sun and it was everything else.

He had to get control of the thing, the ting, like hearing the librarian’s desk bell ting when he was deep in the stacks, far from her desk but hearing it, clear, and knowing it was time to go, it was closing time.

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.