Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (14 page)

“Mr. Levine?” she whispered. “Do you see that orangutan doing stretching exercises over there?”

I assured her I did.

She sighed with relief, like she wasn’t going crazy after all.

“Mr. Levine?”

“Yeah.”

“The hell’s going on?”

I just shook my head.

“Mr. Levine?”

“Yes, Eliza.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“I think we both are.”

Chains was enjoying himself so much, he decided to be generous. “Tell you what, sport. You beat Mofo—” The other Apes hooted with laughter at this preposterous notion: “—I’ll let you and your lady friend and even Mofo’s little fuck-buddy leave here alive.” He held up his hand: “Scout’s honor.”

What the hell other choice did I have? Way I saw it, I could just curl in a ball and allow myself to be torn limb from limb by an orangutan, or I could throw a few punches for pride’s sake, and then be torn limb from limb by an orangutan.

I sucked in my gut, stripped off my shirt and handed it to Eliza.

“Good luck, Mr. Levine.”

“You get a chance,” I whispered to her, “run.”

I forced myself to look at my opponent. My mouth went dry and I swallowed hard and my Adam’s apple tried to choke me. The orangutan was pacing at the other end of the yard, bunching his wrecking ball fists, his knuckles popping like firecrackers. He glared at me contemptuously and I knew he could smell my fear. Scared as I was, all I could think about was Boar Hog Brannon and the beating he’d given me the last time I fought. Sure, there’d been bar brawls and parking lot punch-ups since then, but nothing like that painful night in the prize ring.

And of course, nothing like this.

Smiley was smiling a bloody smile and waving his axe like it was a Mofo pennant. Watching me get beaten to death by an orangutan was clearly a more fitting demise than anything he could have devised himself. “Fuggim ugg, Moofoo!” he cried around his shattered dentures. The other Apes crowded around the dooryard, baying for blood and barking their support for Mofo.

Chains dragged Eliza to the porch steps and sat down, pulling her onto his lap.

I glanced at him, started saying, “What are the rules here—?”

Then the orangutan’s arm cleared the length of the dooryard like a long hairy bargepole, and he speared me with a jab that snapped my head back and to the left like the JFK kill shot. The blow shuddered down through me, buckled my knees and made me pigeon-toed. Before I even knew what hit me, the orangutan was charging, kicking up dust as he thundered across the yard towards me. I tried to cover up, but my arms refused to cooperate. I could only watch helplessly as the orangutan threw a long looping uppercut that exploded on my chin and hurled me back off my feet like a ragdoll. I hit the deck with a grunt, skidded back across the dirt like a skipping stone, thumping my head against a rusted engine block and jerking to a stop. The orangutan loomed above me, waving his arms above his head like Clay taunting Liston.

The Apes cheered.

“Rules?” Chains cackled from his perch on the porch steps. “Protect yourself at all times, slugger!”

Splayed on my back in the dirt, my entire body was numb, prickling with pins and needles. I would have been content just to lie there and let the orangutan beat me to death. As long as it didn’t do to me what it had done to Ned, I could live with that. Except I hadn’t managed to throw a single punch yet, and God help me, I still had a shred of pride. I glanced at Eliza and saw the fear shining in her eyes. That was enough to stoke the furnace. I climbed to my feet—staggered but stayed up—brushed myself down. I pawed my face to check that my nose was still there. My fingers prodded a vaguely nose-shaped lump of putty that flared angrily. I snorted blood and spat it out on the dirt. Then I raised my mitts and nodded to the orangutan, acknowledging the shot that’d floored me.

“Not bad,” I said, “but let’s see you try that again—” The words had barely left my lips before he swarmed back in. I tried to block the barrage of blows, but he smashed through my guard like a battering ram at the castle gates, and I started eating lefts and rights like I was starving for them. But I held my ground, tucked my chin to my chest and soaked up the punishment—my one saving grace was I had a chin like George Chuvalo, and a noggin like a fucking rock—praying to the boxing gods that the orangutan would soon run out of gas.

The stubborn bastard refused to tire. I was fading fast myself. I wrestled him into a clinch, hanging on for dear life. The stench of his fur made me retch. I was grateful for my broken nose, that I couldn’t get a proper whiff of him. Tying up his arms, I pounded his ribs with crunching hooks. He just shrugged and threw me off him. As I staggered back, flailing my arms to keep my balance, my fist connected with his wounded shoulder and he let out a roar of pain.

The sound was music to my ears.

I’d hurt the sonofabitch; if he could be hurt, he could be beat.

Leastways, that’s what I was hoping.

Keeping out of range of his long arms, I started circling him like a shark scenting blood, preying on that wounded shoulder with popping jabs. The old training started coming back; I bobbed and weaved, darted in and out, sticking his shoulder with stinging shots and dancing away before he tagged me back.

I didn’t know how long we’d been fighting, but I heard Smiley curse as his bet went to shit, and I got cocky, couldn’t resist winking at him—

That was a mistake.

The orangutan rocked me with a right I never saw coming.

I did see the left; that’s the one that dropped me.

I lay there pole-axed, eyes pinballing around in my skull, my vision blurred; I saw a whole colony of orangutans waddling forwards leisurely to finish me off.

I glanced at Eliza. Mouthed,
I’m sorry
. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she bowed her head like Talia Shire in the
Rocky
movies. Usually that’s enough to inspire the Italian Stallion to one last onslaught, and victory. Not me. I was done.

But somehow I managed to drag myself up off the ground; when the orangutan killed me, I wanted to die on my feet, not lying in the dirt like a dog.

Mofo gave me a little nod—a mark of grudging respect, as if I’d given him more than he’d bargained for. Then he cocked his fist like he was drawing back on a hunting-bow, and as he let it fly—I dipped my head and caught the punch on the rock-hard dome of my skull. The orangutan shrieked as his knuckles fractured. He staggered back in pain, nursing his injured right paw, unable to even clench his fist. I swarmed him, and he covered up, jabbing weakly with his left to fend me off. But the damage I’d done to his wounded shoulder was money in the bank, and there was no strength in the shots. Bobbing and weaving past his pansy jab, I bulled my way forwards and worked his body, chopping him with hooks that cracked his ribs and made him gasp. He covered up his midsection—leaving his head unguarded—and then I pounced at him with a leaping left hook filled with fifteen years of bitterness and self-loathing, regrets and what ifs.

I never threw a sweeter shot. It landed right on the button, clean on the point of the chin. His head damn near rotated like the girl’s in
The Exorcist
. He went down hard, like the tree that pulped Lester, out-cold before he hit the ground. A great cloud of dust billowed up and I sank to my knees at his feet. I’d put everything I had into that punch and didn’t have the strength left to even raise my arm in victory. But maybe that was just as well. Judging by their shocked expressions, the Damn Dirty Apes would not have appreciated me showboating.

Eliza wrestled free from Chains’s arms and scrambled across the yard to embrace me. “You did it, Mr. Levine!” “You bet,” I gasped—and then celebrated by puking in the dirt.

I caught my breath and then looked up at Chains, who was glaring daggers at me from his stoop on the porch. “We had a deal, right?” He didn’t answer. Just climbed to his feet and went over to Mofo. He shook his head in disgust at the unconscious ape. “Fucking fleabag don’t deserve to wear the ink,” Chains muttered. He snapped his fingers at Shitface. “Drag his sorry ass inside.”

Shitface crouched over the orangutan and started slapping his face. Mofo snorted awake, blinking in confusion and shaking his head as if to clear the stars from his eyes. Shitface hauled the orangutan to his feet, slung an arm around his waist, and helped him stagger inside the farmhouse. Chains returned his attention to me.

“About our deal?” I said, a little less optimistically.

“Deal’s off,” Chains said.

Then he nodded to Smiley. “Kill this motherfucker.”

Eliza clung to me. “No! You can’t!”

“Sweetheart,” Chains said with a sigh, “you oughta be worrying ‘bout what we’re gonna do to you.”

Baby Doll stepped forwards and slapped the curse that was forming on Eliza’s lips. Then the biker bitch grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to where Chains was standing at the foot of the porch.

Smiley and Blubberguts loomed in front of me. Blubberguts snatched the sawed-off from his thigh holster and started raising it to my head. Smiley deflected the gun with his axe, the rusted blade clanging off the barrels. The big man frowned at Smiley in confusion. A rope of congealed blood was dangling from his ear where I’d clobbered him with the AK. But compared to what I’d done to Smiley’s mouth—shredded lips, chunks of false teeth embedded in his gums—Blubberguts looked in great shape. The big man seemed to acknowledge this and holstered his sawed-off. I was all Smiley’s.
Shit
.

Smiley planted his feet like a golfer and then measured me with the axe for the blow that would cleave my skull in two. Hefting the axe high above his head, he was about to bring it slicing down—when a deafening cannon roared and Blubberguts’s upper torso suddenly burst like a blood-filled piñata, his head smashed away as if by an invisible wrecking ball. Smiley and me were splattered in gore like we’d just done the Ice Bucket Challenge in a washtub of hog guts. Blubberguts’s lower body remained intact. His intestines unspooled in thick red ropes. He rocked back on the heels of his biker boots. Then his legs did a little Elvis shimmy and his bottom half thudded to the ground beside me, his feet twitching and raking the dirt.

For a moment, as the echoing roar of the cannon faded over the farm, time seemed to stand still; no one moved, frozen in shock.

Then I mopped the viscera from my eyes and looked across the overgrown yard.

My first thought was not how Salisbury had survived—I remembered him saying that God loved a skunk aper—but to wonder if he’d waited to see how my fight with the orangutan panned out before springing into action.

Still, I was glad to see the crazy sonofabitch, especially that elephant gun of his.

Smoke billowed from the barrels as he strode towards the farmhouse.

“Unhand the woman, you fornicating barbarians!”

Salisbury fired off another shot. The porch upright next to Chains exploded into sawdust and splinters. A huge hole was blasted through the wall of the farmhouse. The porch roof buckled and collapsed. Chains leapt out of the way before he was buried beneath an avalanche of timber. Half his face was studded with wooden shrapnel, the wounds oozing blood. He hit the ground in a combat roll. Came back up with his six-shooter blazing. Skinning the hammer like a Wild West gunfighter. The sound of the six-shooter was nothing compared to the elephant gun—a chain of firecrackers to an H-bomb—but Chains’s aim was truer. Salisbury was reloading as the shots struck his chest and he staggered back with a cry and collapsed beneath the line of the tall grass.

I glanced back at Eliza. That girl was no pushover. She’d taken advantage of the chaos and was now rolling around in the dirt with Baby Doll. They were going at it like wildcats in a sack, pulling hair and clawing eyes and yowling. Eliza rolled on top of Baby Doll and started throttling the bitch with her own necklace. When Baby Doll lay still on the ground—choked out—Eliza tore the necklace from her neck and gave a primal scream, waving it over her head like a trophy.

I shouted, “Run, Eliza!”

“What about Ned?”

“Just get the hell out of here!”

Still clutching her trophy necklace, Eliza scuttled away from the house and dove into a thicket of tall grass, ducking for cover behind a rusted feed trough.

Satisfied she was safe, I scrabbled through the dirt towards Blubberguts’s remains … and the sawed-off in his thigh holster. Smiley—streaked in gore and frozen in shock—saw what I was doing, snapped out of his inertia, and began raising the axe to hurl it at me. There was no time for me to wrench the sawed-off from the holster, so I just aimed Blubberguts’s leg at Smiley and pulled the trigger. The shot tore through the bottom of the holster and obliterated Blubberguts’s foot before it punched a ragged red hole through Smiley’s stomach. The axe dropped from his hand and he splashed to the ground in a pool of his own blood and guts, his toothless mouth popping like a fish.

Now I wrestled the sawed-off from Blubberguts’s holster—

A long length of chain snaked around the barrels and the shotgun was snatched from my hands. I looked up in surprise. Chains had removed the biggest of the chains from around his neck and was wielding it like a bullwhip. With an expert flick of his wrist, he sent the sawed-off clattering away in the dirt far from my reach; another flick of his wrist and then the chain whistled through the air towards me. The heavy steel links smashed into my chest, punching the wind from my lungs. As I hacked for breath, Chains darted forwards and started whipping me with the chain like a junkyard Indiana Jones. It was all I could do just to curl into a ball, shielding my skull as he flogged me with the chain.

Sheltering behind the feed trough, Eliza saw me in trouble and hatched a plan to rival the bridge fiasco, a plan that would have been the envy of the late Lester Swash. Digging a Zippo lighter from her pocket, she set fire to the plastic doll heads on Baby Doll’s necklace. As their nylon hair caught light, they burned like marshmallows, and she fetched up a rock and pitched it through the farmhouse window. Then she hurled the flaming necklace like a bola. It sailed above Chains and me … through the broken window … straight into the Apes’ shake-and-bake meth lab.