Chapter 11 The Captain rode at the head of the company. These men were chaotic of mind. But order was not set aside because of their indifference. They rode on, the desert plain rich in red oxide and in copper by whose organic compounds are purported the earth’s origins, the ordering up of eons of the ancient chaos and other supposing. There stood in this place a Mennonite. The Mennonite watched them. He stepped forward, stopped before Jacobs. His eyes were teary. He said: “The vengeance of God slumbers. It was made ten million years before we were and only we have the means to raise it up. Hell ain’t full, boy. You go forth to a foreign land to wage a war of a mad man’s making. More than dogs’ll wake.” Jacobs spat and motioned his company forward, and they rode and soon a shot rang out across the land, and a member amongst them arched his neck as a hole appeared in his forehead and the ball entered time and sped like anti-matter moving backward, and a corresponding hole punched out the back of his head, and the ball exploded out in a clot of gore, and all that the man had ever known spewed to the rock. The man plummeted off his horse as his sinew fell, smoking, to the rock, and he crashed to the desert stone, shot in the head without a cure. The company stopped where they rode. Jacobs dismounted and glassed the horizon with a telescope. He then put it back and approached the dead man. He saw that the Mennonite stood above the fallen, his hat in his hands. The Mennonite said: “There is no such joy in a goal as there is on the road thereto.” And the Mennonite vanished altogether in the waves of heat in the desert like the last host of all Christendom. *** The company rode on. The scavenger birds flew in the sky, and they ate blood, as the life of the flesh is in the blood, and long ago, given on the alter, it would make atonement for the soul, as it is blood which atones the soul and nothing other. So it was, and is, and will be hereafter. And the company rode upon a dry old crone, half naked, weathered and old. She gestured to Jacobs and raised her eyes to the level of his horse’s knees. She spoke in Spanish and in broken English of the savage in this land. Jacobs set his holstered pistol to half-cock and pointed with his left hand across the horizon. She turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to her temple and fired. At the far side of the woman’s head a fissure of gore erupted big enough to be fisted and her brain vomited out and she fell down into a basin of bloody puke and there was no cure. “Git that recite,” Jacobs said. The Mexican, solitary of his race among these men, dismounted and stepped to the smoking ruin of the woman, the fist-sized hole in it like an anal cavity lubricated with blood, and he stood over the corpse and scalped it.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 12:12:22 +0000
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