Black Hole (10 page)

. . .
when you're recon, they drop you anywhere. And it's in the complete fucking dark. Not regular dark, this is fuck-you dark. You have to do that, or you'll be shot dead by the time you land. Well to this god damn day I don't know what happened. I landed in a booby trap or some shit. One minute I'm parachuting in, then my whole world is pain, and then I wake up in someone's hut.

I was knocked unconscious, and by some fucking miracle, I wasn't
hurt that bad. My legs and ankles were all jacked up and sprained, but nothing was broken. These villagers hadn't seen a white man before. I was a little farther behind the lines than was ever official. Hell, I'm not even saying I was in Nam for all it matters to you. Point is, this old broad is nursing me back to health, and I was the biggest thing to ever happen to this little piece-of-shit village.

Well this village is being terrorized by a fucking tiger. This tiger comes in whenever it feels like and kills their pigs and chickens like it's some kind of fucking buffet. Now that may not sound like much to you and me, but it's the literal life of these people. Slowly, the way they eat is being diminished. Still, they're bringing me bowl after bowl of homemade food. They can't do shit. They have one rifle, a .22 piece-of-shit, and a 410 bore shotgun that don't have no shells. But I have an M16.

That's why they're getting me healthy. That's why they're going hungry so I can eat. They've been praying for an answer, and then some dude falls from the sky covered in weapons? Yes, I was sent by God, and their food is tribute to God. If I get well enough, I figure it's my duty to whatever cosmic force that kept me alive to help these people.

When I get better, I live up to my end of the bargain. I know I'm going to find that fucking tiger and kill the fuck out of it.

So I set up a perch in a tree. I tie a few piglets to a stake in the middle of town. And I wait. And wait. And wait. Nothing. This stripy son of a bitch won't show his furry fucking ass for nothing.

Fuck it, you know, I get out of that fucking tree to go take a dump and get something to eat and see which one of these villagers wants to fuck her first white guy. As soon as I hit the ground, I hear nothing.

Hearing nothing is bad. The jungle is noisier than any city street. The jungle is as noisy as Manhattan. Monkeys and birds and all
kinds of shit, a constant crowd of noises. Once you're in the jungle for a while, that shit is louder than a god damn parade.

When the jungle gets quiet, something is up. Shit got quiet because everything in this fucking jungle is afraid of this fucking tiger, and that tiger has to be right on top of me.

I look around. I can't see shit. But I know it sees me. I'm next. It's not looking at the piglets. It's looking right at me. The piglets aren't anything more than hors d'oeuvres compared to me. The whole jungle wants it to eat me. The jungle has nothing against me, but you know, better me than it, when it comes to getting eaten.

The ground raises up and hits me with six hundred pounds of force. I throw up from the movement—my insides just shoot out like stepping on a tube of toothpaste. Fucker waited till I turned around.

My M16 is gone; I'm looking at the insides of my backpack scattered about the ground in front of me. A flare gun. Better than nothing. I grab it, roll over, and I'm looking death in its fucking face, and it's all teeth and fur and tongue and hot spitty breath. This mouth just opens and gets bigger and fucking bigger. He's going to bite my head off.

I jam that flare gun into his mouth, down his throat, and pull the fucking trigger. Smoke and burnt hair, and he drops like fucking that. No matter what a badass he was on the outside, he was all soft and pink and flammable on the inside.

I'm lying underneath six hundred pounds of striped death, and I think, Holy shit, I can't breathe. I could suffocate under this son of a bitch. I'm squashed too flat to inhale.

The whole damn village comes and takes it off me. They watched the whole thing like it was the fucking Super Bowl. I'm fucked up from the whole thing, every last bit of adrenaline and endorphins emptied into my bloodstream. I'm shaking and numb. I'm covered in blood and piss and random liquids that came from inside the tiger.

They lead me down to the river, strip me, then wash me, all the while singing some song they all seem to know. Then they lead me back to the chief's hut.

So they bring me the village whore to fuck me, feed me all kinds of shit, and kids are making me things out of sticks and bamboo. One guy who actually has a job in the city tells me he's going to make a knife for me. Asking me all kinds of things about it. I don't speak what he speaks, but we both speak a little French. Or so I think.

I tried to ask him for a sixteen-inch knife. Sixteen is my lucky number, right? But I messed up something in the translation. He comes back with a sixteen-kilogram knife. Thirty-five fucking pounds. I had to get a backpack sheath made for this thing. The handle has this brass-knuckle-style grip around it. A lead-filled brass pommel the size of a fist. The blade is thick as an ax head at the top. And sharp. Hell.

Recon is about killing quietly. And this knife could kill a man before he felt it cut him. I could crush a man's skull with the dull end. Hell, I busted locks with that shit. Years later I opened coconuts with it, but that's another story. It was way too heavy for traditional knife fighting. But if I touched a guy with it and let the weight drop, I'd cut that fucker in half.

I brought it down on a man's shoulder once. His arm just popped off. He didn't even feel it. Just looked over at it, looked back at me, and fell over. Bled out. Shit. Went through anything and anyone. Some poor fucker tried to block it as it was coming down, and I cut his forearm off and it went right through his chest about halfway.

Man, I loved that fucking knife. Dropped it on my foot one day, and that was it for my service. Front half of my left foot was just gone. That knife kept me alive and sent me home . . .

I say,
Hell of a story, John. I have to go see a man about a horse, and I'm going to need a gun.

You fucking kids. Letting history go by you.

I'm forty-three.

Still a fucking kid. You can still shit just like that. When you get older, you'll miss the days when the shit just flew right out of you.

I poop like I have a Swiss asshole, yes. Now, about the guns.

In the alley is a dirty van, a blue-and-gray custom that's seen better days. When John opens the door, there's a moment of freedom followed by a grip of wet dog stink. It's overwhelming. I'm trying not to look like I notice.

John enters the mouth of the horrible beast and returns with a duffel bag. He unzips it, takes out a folded towel. I recognize the towel. It's from the gym down the street in the Potrero Shopping Center. But it's stained and nasty, not like they'd want it back. John probably lives in his van and showers at the gym.

Three guns are laid out, from biggest to smallest, Goldilocks style.

This here is the .50-caliber Desert Eagle. Same shit Omar used in
The Wire
. Ever since then, every wannabe gangster carries this. Now, if you can handle it, you can kill anyone with one shot. Hell, you can crack the engine block of a car with this. Only problem is, it's heavy and hard to use quickly.

This is a SIG Sauer. Now this is a nice piece. For a little extra, I'll throw in some dumdums I have for it. CIA bullets that come out of the barrel end over end rather than spiraling. Less accurate, but if you hit a man in the arm, the bone will shatter. One hit anywhere, man's lucky he's alive.

And this last little fella is a .25-caliber Raven. Nice little guy. Six rounds. Nothing in the way of real stopping power, but hell, you
shoot a guy, it'll take all the piss out of him. Better than nothing, and it's great in a knife fight. Easy to carry and conceal.

I used to have one like that. Where is it? What happened to it? It looks just like the one I had. I try to remember where it is, but it's like the memory is being erased as I access it. Wherever it is, looks like I need another. If I can't find it, it's of no use to me.

How much for the Raven?

Two hundred.

Steep.

Illegal.

You have a point. Throw in shells?

Of course.

You have a problem?

What?

I mean, do you have a problem I could help you with?

Nothing in particular . . .

It looks like you're flush. If there's a problem with a specific person, I could make that problem go away.

Nah, it's more of a preventative measure.

Well, keep me in mind if something specific comes up.

Back in the bar. Drinks. Lights drip and bleed. I'm coming down off something and coming on to something else. I'm an amusement park of drugs. More liquor. Black girl drinking Vanilla Stoli, she's pouring her own Cherry Coke in it. I try to order one. She laughs. I have no idea what I'm saying. Fuck I'm high. She slips me a pill. I take it.

You feelin' better, honey?

Yeah, that pill's working fine, took the edge off.

Glad to be of help.

Hey, did you see a guy in the ER who came in covered in shit?

Oh god, yes.

How's he doing?

The other nurses turn away. The laughter stops.

That ain't nothing to talk about right now.

I need to know . . .

Well, hell's bells. That boy got hosed off, and he had the nastiest gangrenous abscesses on both arms we'd ever seen over there. That's no bullshit either; we had to take pictures of them to show medical students.

Did you get him taken care of?

Aw, honey. We had to cut both his arms off. He was damn near dead. It was all that toxic shit in his blood that made him that crazy. If he hadn't come in when he did, he would have died in a few hours. The worst part . . . never mind.

Please.

No.

Please?

We had to do it without his permission. By the time he woke up, they were gone. He was still out of it. Asked me why he was strapped down. Motherfucker was still too high from the surgery to notice he didn't have arms. That's why he couldn't move 'em. Fuck. That's some real sad shit.

She drained her drink. I've worked bad jobs and weird jobs and I drank at them. I drank before and during jobs. But I've never really had a drive-me-to-drink job. Kind of the other way around with me. I kept jobs because I wanted to keep drinking. Two drunks, sitting next to each other, drinking in the early morning, couldn't be more different.

I have a graveyard full of dead friends. Once you hit forty, it's what happens. People die. It's not even tragic anymore.

When you were a teenager and that kid in your school died, it was a big deal. There was a page in the yearbook. You get high at a bonfire party and someone brings him up and someone cries and then everyone cries and there's making out and you feel horrible like the emptied bowels of a cow, but fuck, this might be the time you get laid, so there's that . . .

And in your twenties it happens, but it's almost beautiful, it's so tragic. You know a guy who died trying to climb a mountain. You know a guy who died in a bus in South America where he was doing Peace Corps work. There's the weird sudden cancer that takes someone far too young, WTF cancer. There's the OD of the guy who tried morphine during his semester abroad.

Then in your thirties, it's all fucked. That's when the bad ones go down. They found his body murdered, but he's a junkie so who gives a shit. They found her skull at a campground; she died hiking years ago. There was a bad batch of heroin with a flesh-eating virus. Motorcycle crackups. Drunk driving. Surfers caught in a riptide.

Forties, it's all old age, terminal disease, and suicides. Cancer. Suicide. Heart failure. Cancer. Pneumonia. Cancer. So much fucking cancer. All kinds. The slow kind that kills you over years, and the stomach pain that kills you in six months. Too late to quit smoking when you have four-months-to-live kind of cancer. People die, and you think, that's what old people die of, and you realize, yeah, I'm old.