ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 34
Superman's going to be here any minute. This is a joke.
The eyes. Snow was never so cold. Yes, eyes say a lot and this guy had
killed. More than a few, and he hadn't lost much sleep over it. One has to
be awake first to lose sleep. Coal. There is no feeling in coal. It's just... that
they're just black. Christ. No, this is ajoke and the joke is over. I'm leaving.
A blow buckled me to my knees again. With a thick, dirty thumb he ran his
skin over the iron. No. This is a goddamn movie and I want to go and get some
goddamn popcorn, I'm thinking, and no one's going to clap because I'm not
goddamn John Wayne. I'm a bit player and who's going to know? Who's going
to send the script home?
I'll never forget his words. Did I imagine them? They didn't even seem
Spanish. He said, with his mouth, with his eyes:
"El cuchillo no tiene bastante filo. Traeme una piedra."
The new prop was produced, put in Dog's other hand from behind.
Slowly he sat on a tree stump before me and spat on this stone, and with his
keen gaze on wand and stone began to build an edge. Rhythm. Like waves
on sinister sand. And the eyes. Once they had put the blade to grain they
never left me. He may as well have been carved out of that tree if it weren't
for the animation of that knotted forearm and its iron extension. His
caramel-glazed face never moved a muscle, but the gaze. He knew me. No,
not my history or my ...beliefs, but he knew me as much as any man needed
to know in that stinking place. He saw me there and his purpose was to take
that knife and ...
Cold. How cold a man could be. Did it really matter a damn to me? He
must just be neurotic about his weapon. Who the hell puts that much concern
into a weapon? !fit can kill, well, get on with it. I didn't need the theatrics.
What a decision to make. Them or me. I tried to think of what I would do,
but it really didn't matter by then, did it? Does it?
I looked at the kid ... and it's like he had grabbed God's book and read
all this before-hand. The other two, the man and the woman, were oblivious
to the whole thing, he an induced epileptic and she catatonic. That's it. This
whole thing is a big applied psychology experiment with induced national
insanity. Fuck the lab. The kid just watched. Would he have ever said
"Better you than me?" Or did he just know that my tombstone had a date
before his?
But what the hell, why was I going to sit there and cry about it? I'll give
you the truth ...the truth. I told myself after that-I think, yes, I read this
somewhere-that I was already dead. The Samurai. They believed that
when they took up the sword, they died, and that every day living was just
some happy bonus on the paycheck. I told my friends this and it was ego.
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