John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

“Shoot,” a voice at his ear, and he pulled the trigger.

The Devils limped under the red ball rain, suddenly pirouetted into the air or, taking one cleft step, dropped punctured and deflated, arms curling then flat on the ground. One jumped to his machine and Luke, again readying for the painful blow, looked full into the enormous reflecting goggles, the startled stare, and watched the dovetailed shot fan wide. Calmly he wiped the floating smoke from the muzzle.

Some mounted and in graceful frenzy drove head on toward the truck, beat their skinny jointless arms. Luke watched them coming, the Devils skimmed across his sights, kicked up their wheels. With blue powdered hands he gripped the carved wood stock, the hammered, tarnished silver, and he drank the waves of Bohn’s sweaty firing. He saw nothing but the nugget on the end of the gun, cross-eyed at the bead, watching it circle of its own will and apart from any target …

“Lead them. They fly too fast for dead on aim. Swing your arms.”

His eye crept along the hexagonal gun metal. There was no cotton in his ears, nothing to dull the slapping of air on either side as Bohn and the Sheriff discharged their weapons into the belly of the dam. The sweep before the truck was filled with leaves perforated and lightly touched by the swarms of buckshot. He crooked a finger on the sticky trigger. He reached out for ammunition. Then: “This is for one. And this is for another.”

He could feel the eruption under his nose before he squeezed; he fell back with the mistake, the searing, double dinosaurian footfall of the twin bores.

And suddenly, from the isolated battering truck, shrill and buoyant above the clumsiness of thick-kneed marksmen, there came that cool baying of the rising head, the call to kill, louder and singsong, faintly human after the flight of Devils, the nasal elated sounds of the cowboy’s western bark.

Yip, yip, yip.

now I’ll talk .

You’ve answered to me for having found him crouched with bare, folded feet, for having watched the thinly wrinkled, perforated breath of skin that was his throat — dry now, untouched, except for the soothing pressure of some tons of earth — for having spied on the wrappings, the colorless cloth, the complete expulsion of bodily fluids, the immobility of ten dangling fingers shoved like minnows into the shriveled ground .

One town further then: last seen by a river peering upward into his lumpy jaws .

Take me there .