Satan’s Game
His mother was washing pots in the kitchen. She said they put saltpeter in the food.
The salt burned his eyes and the sky was even brighter.
Nowhere to look.
There was a child around somewhere, the same child he’d almost met that morning in the forest, the one who’d had his knuckles rapped. He knew immediately that the child would be the most dangerous thing he had to face, the hardest thing to get by.
A turned-around kid who made up stories — wise guy, card player. They all made up stories in the Booth Shelter, they all told lies about themselves. The boys and the girls both.
The kid walked beside him, making him feel bad, making him feel like a kid himself.
“Whaddaya doin’?”
“Walking across this here.”
“My father’s got a rifle like that.”
“You got no father and if you had he wouldn’t have no rifle like that.”
“He bought me a twenty-two and showed me how to shoot it. The first time I did, the concussion almost knocked me over.”
“There’s no concussion to a twenty-two. You like guns?”
“I love ‘em. I love the way they look. I’m from out west. From Texas. I’m part Comanche.”
“You’re from Bloomington, Indiana, and then Milwaukee and then Omaha and then Chicago. You never saw an Indian but on a nickel. You can’t shit me. How come you tell lies like that?”
“Nobody calls me a liar.”
“Yes, they do. All the time they do. You wait till you grow up, you’ll have all the guns you want, all the dope and all the women.”
“I could go for that, I guess. I’m gonna join the Marines.”
“You better believe it. That’s the Training School tradition, you join the fucking Marines whether you want to or not. The social worker’ll shame you into it. When you get down to Paris Island you’ll recognize the other kids from the Training School because they steal.”
“I’m a good stealer.”
“No, no,” Hicks said, “you cut that out, that’s for punks. You’ll wash the punk off you when you’re out in the fleet. Just keep your mouth shut and watch how people do. Watch how the Japs do, they’re the coolest people in the world.”
Just as he had feared, he began to feel cold. His side began to hurt as though for the first time.
“I know you,” Hicks said. “I wish I didn’t but I do. You better do something about the way you cringe and whine. I don’t want to see you do it. That’s why I don’t want you around here now.”
He stared down at the tracks as he walked, the crossties one after another kept him going.
“For one thing it makes you weaker. For another nobody gives a shit. Who are you whining to? People? They don’t care.
“Look where we are kid, we’re walking on salt, nobody gets us out of here but me. The people are over on the other side of those goofy and we don’t need a single one of the son of a bitches.”
He stopped and watched the mountains vibrate.
“You know what’s out there? Every goddamn race of shit jerking each other off. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis, two hundred million rat-hearted cocksuckers in enormous cars. Rabbits and fish. They’re mean and stupid and greedy, they’ll fuck you for laughs, they want you dead. If you’re no better than them you might as well take gas. If you can’t get your own off them then don’t stand there and let them spit on you, don’t give them the satisfaction.”
Careless of the pain, he unslung the rifle and propped the stock against his hip. “Knuckle me, you fucking pig, I’ll kill you. Go up on a bridge and let them have it, watch the motherfuckers die.”
“I’ll kill you,” Hicks screamed.
“Ray,” the old lady said, “don’t get so mad. You’ll just throw up on the tracks again.”
“It wasn’t me that did, Ma Ma. It was another kid I seen him.”
Oh man, don’t cringe. It’s a terrible thing to cringe.
At the Training School, he was still pissing his pants at thirteen. He’d carry the underwear around with him, hid den, afraid to put it in the laundry bag because it was labeled. Hid it under the bed and then did the same with the next pair. Oh my God, two pairs of them all pissed on, they’ll beat shit out of me.
Terrible thing.
Like the nigger who shined shoes in the basement of the enormous roadhouse they had near the Jacksonville stock-car track. Old man who went back to oughty ought. Whenever a drunk staggered down the stairs, he’d grin. Grin for all he was worth. The meaner the old boy who came in down to piss, the wider that grin got, big horse teeth straining under the lip meat.
Smiling through. Shit, maybe he was amused.
What’s funny, boy?
No — there’s no forgiveness for that, nobody can forgive anybody for making them that scared. No man forgives another man for scaring him like that.
There was a bullet-head priest in the German Catholic church on the Northside and one day he and his mother went there to beg. The squarehead slammed a fifty-cent piece down on a table so they went to North Avenue and had sundaes and saw The Crusades. Taking Jerusalem. Thanks for the flick, you Kraut bastard, I wish I had your fat ass out here now.
God, Hicks thought, it just makes it hurt.
Dieter. Got him back on the mountain. Friendly fire. You couldn’t hear him, you could only watch the way he was acting. He was asking for it. Cringing.
All those people. Marge.
Remember what this is for. Remember what it is you want or it won’t make any difference. Sometimes it’s work remembering. Indifference to the ends of action — that’s Zen. That’s for old men.
It’s worse. It’s getting away.
Triangle.
It’s distorted in the heat, it can’t hold its shape.
Get up there you devil.
Gate gate paragate parasam gate bodhi swaha.
Again.
Gate gate paragate parasam gate bodhi swaha.
No not that one. You’ll go out on that one.
Absolutely nothing out here, he thought, but me and the mountains and the salt. Nothing to manipulate, nothing to work with but the tracks. What a waste of awareness and coordination.
He worked on the triangle, honing its edges, cleansing it of salt, blotting out the image of the tracks. It was hard, but for a while the pain was contained. When it stopped him again, he took a drink of water and looked at his arm.
His arm was enormous, so swollen within his sleeve that he could not take hold of the doth between his fingers.
It occurred to him that he might try making the triangle larger.
It worked. With what seemed to him extraordinary ease, the triangle’s dimensions expanded, the red circle within it swelled and vibrated to the beating of his heart. He could make it as large as he chose, there was no limit.
The containment of pain, he realized suddenly, was the most marvelous and subtle of the martial arts, a spiritual discipline of the highest refinement. As his own pain eased, he came to understand that now he might carry within his mind and soul immense amounts of it. A master of the discipline, such as he was now becoming, might carry infinite amounts of pain. Far more than his own.
A lesser man, he thought, might consider making money out of this. He grew excited and his excitement almost caused him to fall and upset the infinite triangle.
He could do it for other people, for those not acquainted with the martial arts. If there was a way for all the people on the far side of the goofy mountains to let him have their pain, he could take it up and bear it across the salt.
Happy as he was, he began to cry because Dieter had not lived to hear of it.
All that cringing, all those crying women, whining kids — I don’t want to see that, I don’t like it. Give it here.