“I already got one,” Dunk said, showing Mahoney the Swiss Army knife he always carried.
Mahoney pressed his knife into my palm. Warm from his flesh, the brass fittings greased with sweat.
We picked our way through the trees searching for sticks. An owl nested on a low branch, eyes shining like lanterns. The darkness of Dunk’s hair blended with the blackness under the trees; he seemed as much a part of this wilderness as the owl. I fit my thumbnail into the groove on the Buck knife and pulled it open. The blade clicked smoothly into place—I could smell the oil in the mechanism. Moonlight played off the tiny hairline abrasions along the blade where Mahoney must’ve sharpened it on a whetstone.
When we returned from our mission Bruiser Mahoney was sitting cross-legged, assembling a tent in the van’s headlights. One of the tent poles was bent at a broken-backed angle in his huge hands. Growling, he flung it into the bushes.
“Goddamn Tinkertoys.”
He managed to get one tent up before the van’s battery conked out. We built a ring of rocks and heaped wood inside. Mahoney doused the sticks with turpentine and lit a match.
“Phwoar!” he cried as the flames roared up.
Sap hissed and knots popped in the burning wood. Mahoney reached for a beer but the case was empty. He stood up the way a baby does—hands braced in front of him, walking his heels up to meet them—and shuffled to the edge of the woods. He pissed for a minor eternity—his urine sounded
heavy
, as if threaded with molten lead; I imagined it flattening the weeds and snapping twigs.
His body swung around and he returned to the van, hunting through it. He sat back down with a bottle of white liquor and a big silver handgun.
“I won it in a bet,” he said. “Or I lost a bet and had to take possession of it. I forget now. We might need it tonight.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You think we’re the only creatures out here?”
As the night wore on, Mahoney was coming to resemble an animal himself. I peered through the flames at this shaggy man-beast fumbling with a loaded pistol. He looked like a bear trying to play the piano. The cylinder popped open. Bullets fell into his lap. He pinched them between his fingers and thumbed them back into their holes, then took crooked aim at the trees.
“Bang,” he whispered.
He handed me the bottle. When I hesitated he said: “Your father never gave you a belt of rum? It’s pirate medicine, son.”
Whatever was in the bottle blistered my throat. I coughed convulsively and would’ve puked but there was nothing in my stomach.
Dunk took the bottle. Not only did he keep it down, he took another sip.
“It does taste like medicine,” Dunk said.
“When I was your age I believed totally in the power of medicine,” said Mahoney. “One time my grandfather was coughing. I gave him a cough drop. My grandfather had lung cancer. By the end he was hacking up spongy pink bits.”
“Teach me to wrestle,” Dunk said.
“A fucking
cough drop
… What?”
“To wrestle,” Dunk said. “Teach me.”
“Why? You want to grow up to be like me?”
“I do.”
Mahoney sucked at the bottle and then wiped the shine off his lips. His teeth were the colour of old bone in the firelight.
“Up, then!” he cried. “Stand and fight!”
He leapt across the flames and landed nimbly. Dunk was crab-walking away on his palms and heels. Mahoney hauled him up with no more effort or regard than a man lifting a sack of laundry.
“Lock up,” he snarled, setting himself in a wrestling pose. “Damn you, you wanted to learn so lock up with me!”
Mahoney got down on his knees. He grabbed Dunk’s hands and slapped one on the back of his neck and the other on his shoulder.
“Like that,” he said, settling his hands on Dunk’s own neck and shoulder. “You control the other man this way, see? Now control my head.”
The muscles flexed down Dunk’s arm. Mahoney’s head sat on his neck like a tree stump, moving nowhere. Dunk linked his fingers around the back of Mahoney’s neck, screwed his heels into the ground and pulled as hard as he could.
“Has a butterfly settled on me?” Mahoney asked acidly.
“Owe,” Dunk said, his face contorted with effort, “
help
.”
I wrapped my arms around Mahoney’s bull neck. He wore the same aftershave my father did, the one with the blue ship on the bottle. The hairs on the back of his neck were as soft as the white spores on a dandelion before they blow away in the wind.
Mahoney said: “You’re
huuuurting meeee
…”
His hands shot up, grabbing a fistful of our shirts. He pushed us backwards and we landed hard on our asses and elbows.
“Oldest trick in the book,” he said, whapping dirt off his knees. “Never trust the wounded dog, boys.”
Dunk’s elbow was torn open, blood trickling to his wrist. His hands flexed into fists at his sides. Mahoney was by the fire, bent over his bottle. When he stood up Dunk was right there.
“What?” Mahoney said.
Dunk showed Mahoney his elbow. Not for sympathy, just so the man could see what he’d done.
“Sorry about that,” Bruiser said. “Let’s patch it up.”
Mahoney found a box of Band-Aids in the glovebox and stuck one on Dunk’s elbow. He took the bottle of pills from his pocket, shook a quartet into his palm and chased them with rum.
“That’s wrestling, boys. Want to see what it earns you?” He rolled his trouser up past his knee. “I always wear tights in the ring. Now you see why.”
His kneecap was shattered. The two halves of it lay under his skin with one half twisted to one side, the other sunk beneath his knee joint. It looked like a lunar landing photo. The cratered surface of the moon.
“A steel chair.
Whappo
. Some kind of no-holds-barred contest. The promoter didn’t bother explaining it too well. He was drunk. Anyway, so was I. The guy who chair-shotted me, the Sandman, he was drunk too. I heard the bone crack. Sounded like a starter’s pistol—
pow
!” Mahoney shook his head. “That was Texas. Never wrestle in Texas, boyos.”
He ran his hands through his hair, parting the dark locks. A scar ran across the top of his skull. Pink, ribbed and shockingly thick—it looked like a garter snake frozen under his scalp.
“Razorwire,” he said. “Some kind of crazy thing in Japan. Opened me up to the bone. Blood pissing all over the mat. That’s how they like it over there.
Messy
. I kept wrestling. The both of us greasy with blood. I passed out. Came to in the emergency room with a sweet slant-eyed nurse stitching my head up.”
Everywhere Mahoney had gone left a mark on him. The most crucial testament of his perfection—the fact that he’d come from
outside of Cataract City, the great unknown where perfection was still a possibility—was the very thing that had ruined him.
Dunk said: “Did your dad teach you to wrestle?”
“My dad was a great man,” Mahoney said. “A
beast
! When I was a boy he’d pinch my shoulders and say, ‘Look at those tiny trapezius muscles of yours—they’re mousetraps! You should have bear traps like mine! And your neck’s thin as a stack of dimes—what use is a man who can’t even support the weight of his own skull?’ I was a small boy. Sickly. Born premature. Not much bigger than a kaiser roll, my mother said. She hardly realized I’d come out.
“I got picked on as a boy. Yes! After school I’d make it home a few steps ahead of my tormentors and hide. Then my dad would come home. He was a butcher. His days spent quartering hogs. He’d drag me outside to face the other boys. But before that he’d wad up his apron, still wet with pig blood, and stuff it in my face. ‘Smell it!’ he’d say. ‘It should make you
crazy
! A mad
dog
!’ And so I went out with my face smeared with blood and I’d fight. It made me a better man, and I think every boy should … Did you … Did you …?”
Mahoney was peering into the trees. He closed one eye like he was peering through a magnifying glass, then reared back as if he’d sniffed something foul.
“Did you
see
that?”
Dunk looked. I looked. There was nothing.
“What is it?” said Dunk.
“I … I can’t quite say. But do you know who’s out there?” He screwed his palms into his eye sockets and blinked furiously. “Every manner of psycho and degenerate. Where do you go when polite society rejects you?
The woods
. Eating skunks, biding your time, waiting for your opportunity.”
Mahoney worked his jaw. The interlocking bones clicked beneath his ear. He scrounged the gun out of his jacket pocket. A log cracked
in the fire. He wheeled about in a crazy circle, strafing the trees with the barrel.
“Who is it? Rotten-ass bastard, show yourself! I’ll plug one between your eyes!”
We cowered as the pistol swung on wild orbits. Mahoney drank and wiped his lips with the back of the hand gripping the gun.
“There’s no need for this.” His voice took on a pleading note. “Come sit by the fire. We can—”
A rustling arose beyond the trees and for an instant I swore a face materialized. White as milk apart from the lips, which were as red as blood from a freshly torn vein. Teeth filed to crude points. A ravenous ghoul stalking us from the darkness past the fire.
Mahoney howled—“
Reeeeaaaggh!
”—and fired. Flame spat from the gun to illuminate the fear-twisted contours of his face.
“Weasels,” he snarled. “Cowardly punks.” He raked his fingernails down his cheeks. “Think they can dog me out like that? You let a man dog you even once and he’ll dog you until your last breath! Come on, boys.”
“Where?” said Dunk.
Mahoney pointed to the trees.
Years later I’d wonder if it could possibly have happened as I remembered it.
The woods were black and cold, but not as cold as they would become later. I recall a lack of friction between my body and the things surrounding it—the trees, the spongelike quality of the topsoil—as if I was floating. I remember thinking I was in a place where none of my daily habits carried any impact. I tried to picture my bedroom with the wallpaper my father had put up: a panorama of the earth, small and bright and blue-white as photographed from the moon.
I slipped my finger through Dunk’s belt loop, anchoring him to me. The long muscle that ran up Dunk’s shoulder and neck to his hairline quivered with a nervous, tentative strength. Prickberry bushes tore gashes in my arms. The pain and adrenaline came together in my legs and fingers and head: a cool tingling under my skin, a hot buzz in my skull.
Bruiser Mahoney stalked ahead of us, a huge rumpled shape barely distinguishable from the darkness. He followed the silver finger of the gun barrel, his breath filling the space under the leaves. When he coughed the sound was that of an old refrigerator shutting down, the ancient tubes and fittings rattling against one another.
A serrated leaf feathered my cheek. I brushed it aside, startled by the whiteness of my fingers in the night, then walked through a spider’s web strung between two saplings. The gossamer snapped over my lips and eyelids and for an instant I felt the hollow weight of a spider against my throat, but by the time I’d gathered my breath to scream it was gone, rappelling down my shirt.
“Take heart, lads,” Mahoney whispered. “Fortune favours the brave.”
My eyes adjusted. The woods took shape. Trees rose out of the black loam of the forest floor, bark covered in frost that glittered like pulverized salt. Streamers of fog snaked along the ground; I tasted the mineral wetness of it in the back of my mouth. We made no noise at all—even Mahoney, whose grace had otherwise deserted him—our feet sliding silently over the moist leafless earth.
“Wolverines out here,” said Mahoney. “A wolverine gets hungry enough, it’ll creep into your tent and eat your face off. Wolves, too.”
As soon as he said that, I saw them: hunched shapes moving between the trees, much bigger than dogs, white-tipped fur bristling along their spines. Their smell rode the breeze, the stink of meat rotting between their fangs. My fingers tightened in Dunk’s
belt loop, which I guess made me a pussy but I was too freaked to care.
A stealthy clawing kicked up behind us. Mahoney whirled and fired. I fell to my knees, ears covered against the thunder. There was blood on Mahoney’s cheek where the gun’s hammer had gouged his flesh.
“It flanked round behind us, the sneaky bugger.”
Mahoney trudged off in the direction of his gunfire. We found him bent over a small broken shape. Blood shone in a pool round its spike-shaped head.
“A coon.” Mahoney laughed without mirth. “We’ve been chasing a damn raccoon.”
The animal reeked of blood and piss. Its gums were already hardening, black lips drawn back from yellowed teeth. It looked like it had died very confused. Mahoney bent to pick it up by a hind leg. Back at the fire, he laid the dead animal down with reverence.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Who was he apologizing to, us or the raccoon?
“Hand me my knife,” he said.
Mahoney unfolded the blade and slid the point into the skin between its front legs and sawed down its belly. The raccoon opened up in the firelight.
“If you kill an animal and don’t eat it, you’re cursed forever. Earl Starblanket told me that. He was a pureblood Navajo who used to wrestle as Big Chief Jackdaw.”
Mahoney hacked through the gleaming knots of the creature’s insides. The smell was indescribable. I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth.
Dunk said, “
We
didn’t kill it.”
Mahoney looked up sharply. His hands were black with blood. “We all did. We were a hunting party.”
Dunk shook his head. “Owe and me were just there.”
“That’s right, you were. You witnessed it. Do you want to put your mortal soul in jeopardy?”
Mahoney cut off a strip of meat. He gathered up the raccoon, holding its split body together the way a prim woman holds a purse, humped over to the trees and flung it away. He settled the metal grate over the coals and laid the meat down.
“You don’t eat much,” he said. “Just a bite or two, to honour the animal.”
The meat sizzled. Mahoney speared it with the tip of his knife and turned it over. His lips shone with drool. He crunched some more pills. When the meat was cooked he hacked it into steaming chunks.