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The clouds hawk rain and drum up distant thunder rolling as if they was alive but even more than that, a singular superbeing and coughing and spitting thick globs of phlegm upon the shaken earth. Faint traces of the setting sun just able to make it out beyond this thing, its skywide breadth, before soon they vanish altogether.
Parl sits on the slight hill just off the porch. Popping his cap gun off on the drops, tossing the spent cartridges, reloading, pop pop pop pop. We’re both soaked deep and bones can feel it, they know the rain even under all that fleshiness. Neither him or me in any in any hurry to move. We was born our whole lives lived like amphibians, half underwater. He runs his tongue along his sharp tooth.
“What was it made the first people wanna kill?” he says.
I aint sure what he’s asking. His shadow’s like a black cape off him. His shaved head running water.
“Ancient people found the usefulness in killing. Or the fun in it. Made up glories for it. What I mean is, was it instinctual? Learned from watching a predator hunt? Somehow they knew, or learned, that in order to eat, to grow, to begin to set down roots on a land, it all requires killing. It’s a thing we love. Did the first guy did it love it too? Was there a shock of excitement in his spine at throwing a rock or sharp stick and striking a person or thing, watching them topple? Maybe we knew how to do it before we knew how to do it, something intrinsic. All our greatest moments involve killing. The persisting stories we tell. Without killing who would we be?”
A long nothing of nothing but the thunderhead’s hushed rumbling and the rush of rainwind.
“What’s ‘intrinsic’?” I say.
“Like in our nature. How else could we stomach the mass amounts of it if we didn’t, somewhere in the noiseless part of us, love it as natural as we love food, or play? Maybe we need it. To remind us of something. The first killings were between small tribes but that wasn’t near enough so we made up nations, fight it out on a grander scale, mechanized it, streamlined it all so that it was all easy, smooth. Limbs and bodies torn in ways that I sometimes wonder if even God could’ve foreseen. Did He expect us to love it like we do?”
He stops. Popping the cap gun at the swirling air. It’s just scary is all, a little scary when he talks this way. Mostly I’m brave but he uses words I don’t know any and so sometimes get lost and when he talks this way it plays pictures in my head like a film reel and dislike strongly them images it shows me. Like Pops and the old lawnmower, hand caught in the rusted blades of it, and the sight still bubbles up my stomach and sets my head to spinning. Or like the hole in that dog leaking after Jeth put that BB in it. All us laughing, the sad thing’s frightened yelp. Pops screaming a more true terror than any I’d heard before or since, a sound still stuck and setting in me, me trembling on the back porch watching the red and dripping, and for a second that yell and the dog’s yelp and the thud sound and crunch all rise above the weather and reach a fevered pitch. How many screamed like that in all the mayhem we been up to? How many hit dogs yelped? Awful sounds drifting on and forever through the atmosphere.
“Think of Buster,” he says. “When he came back from all that killing over there, what did he do?”
“Sent up to prison,” I say.
“Kept fighting. Then, eventually, killed again. He never talks about the things he did, or saw. But anyone can see it on him. A new sheen of ferocity. And he fell in love with it, doesn’t it seem so? Kept that violence going. Now he’s in Angola for the rest of his life. At home in a brutal world governed by brutal law.”
“Momma said it’s sure shame. He used to help her in the garden after the mower got Pops. Used to help me in my mathing too, what good it done me.” We laugh lightly.
“Do you miss him any,” I say.
“Of course I do. He was- is- my brother. He just discovered, or woke up a thing, and couldn’t win out over it.”
His voice trails off and he pops the cap gun at me and smiles but it aint a joyful smile.
“So, what is it? Did we learn it? Is it natural? We don’t love it, do we?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Who the hell would wanna.
A howl and shriek cut above the softening rainfall shattering against our ears and we both together stand straight. Cmon I think he says but move hearing only the screams and growlings. We run and run splashing the new cut grass up on our legs, go crashing through the shrubs and skinny young trees. Pine branches scratch at us like bonehands warning us to turn around, like to get us out of something we don’t wanna see.
More running panting and then it’s before us, a scene of pure viciousness like in a bad dream like something not real, a horror film, one leg dangling near torn off, deep bites. The wolf tears savage at a small deer, it’s dying sounds like human groans deep from its belly and entirely full of fear. For a moment see Pops in it, that same primal dreading. It looks at us wet eyed and huge black eyes bigger than all the world swallow us. A final ripping noise and high pitched hellscream and all is hushed except the drizzling rain and wind and both our ragged breathing.
Then the air tears twice loud and jump out of my skin and the wolf makes a strange startled cry like the dog did but worse. It stands then slumps, falls sideways and wet matted fur rises, sinks, stops still. Parl with Buster’s gun. It looks like the same one Buster used to- and where’d you get that I think I say but he don’t pay it any mind. He just stares unblinking at the wolf, the deer, the bodies twisted together like a puzzle. Then he looks at me as if he was asking if I get something unasked, as if to say no matter what the answer to them questions here’s the big one to know: that you aint escaping it, no one is.
I look past his stone expression and shining brown eyes still not blinking into the gunpowder clouds and see the great circle watch face of time and its hand and every tick mark the red of a mowereaten palm.
