There I am down below, and there it is, all of its forms in one. I still can’t see its face but I don’t need to. The bulk of the thing is enough.
It isn’t always a dog on the outside, I’ve noticed over time, but a dog is what it is. It was a woman once, my mind tells me. Probably Arceneaux but probably not, because the weight of it didn’t feel like that old weird swamp woman. It felt heavy, like every girl I ever wanted but couldn’t have, all sitting with the combined burden of desire unfulfilled and fear never fully dealt with. Face full of taunts, eyes lit by hate, clawing at my closed lids. Those yellow eyes staring down at me. But I knew this was just Black Shuck, hound born in the void, weaned on black cream and taught knowledge from the echoed psalms sung to dead stars. It’s not always a dog on the outside, but has a dog’s habit of following after a man until one of them dies.
On the street, in the alleyways, in corner stores and a doctor’s waiting room, Black Shuck takes a shape to help it blend in, to not attract any attention while I remain at the forefront of its every observation. Or maybe I’m just one of many it hunts. I have no way of knowing, other than what my antennae tell me. It might be thousand things, chasing a thousand souls.
But at night, with me, it’s the dog, a half-ton hound perched on top of me when my eyes are closed, sagging the bedsprings and stealing my breath, waiting for me to expire so it can consume me with that huge wet mouth and take me back to its warren to feed its litter, or cast me out into the Great Nothing like scat squeezed into a lake.
I’m not sure how I feel about being eaten. Because I know it will happen eventually, I can’t decide if I just want it to be over with, or if I want to experience each and every agony of being chewed and ground and rent asunder, because I know that it will be the last thing I really feel before the eternity of pure nothing. I don’t know if pain is better or worse than wide-awake paralysis that persists until the end of everything.
I don’t know because I’m a coward.
Big tough coward. Biggest pussy in the world. The war taught me that. No, not taught—verified.
Black Shuck knows this, what I didn’t do back in the jungles of Vietnam, and what I did do in that jungle in Laos. How I did finally rise up when I needed to, and then rose up too far when I shouldn’t have, when I could have just run with my bravery but instead killed with my cowardice. Its roiling consciousness tells me that it knows; its breath, carrying the stink of those bodies, and that one in particular. I can smell it. The coppery smell of muscle without skin gone bad for years.
This thing wants to kill me. Wants me to kill me. Either way, it wants me dead and then have me all to itself.
It’s getting close tonight, because I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in my bed, in the River that’s risen up over my mattress while my body is wrapped in concertina wire. The smallest move will slice my flesh but I can’t move.
Here it comes. The black is coming to take me, and I’m too worn out to fight it anymore. Too tired to use the fear anymore. The River is rushing upward, louder and louder as I sink down deep. It’s wet and cold.
Through the sound of the water, I hear a knock on a faraway door. It’s soft, the knocking, but it’s enough.
Black Shuck is gone.
A knock on a door saves me. It scares away Black Shuck in all its manifestations, which reform and retreat back into it as it slinks off into the shadows where the wall meets the ceiling, a raspy voice and a growl combining with many whispers trailing behind it as it goes.
Maybe it’s a coward just like me, scared of the outside world, those who aren’t supposed to see it.
Big tough coward. Biggest pussy in the void. One more thing we have in common.
Another knocking, louder now. The door has come closer. It might be my own door, but it’s difficult to tell, with the sound of the water receding under my bed, the bladed wire falling off my body and retracting into the floor. I’m still not ready to move, but I know that I can if I need to. My body hurts, my brain is on fire.
A third knock. I need to get up, and go pay tribute. Whoever or whatever it is saved my life. This time, anyway. The next time the hound comes and the River rises will be my last. It has to be. Neither of us can take any more.
4. Birddog
“Wake up, Broussard.”
Broussard raised his chin off his chest and opened his eyes, staring up at the canvas roof of the hooch, where a pink grass moth slowly flexed its wings. It was a patient movement, deliberate, and they thrummed with the sound of a colossus, chopping the air above it outside. Many wings, descending. It was terrible. Broussard felt the fluids inside of him vibrate. He closed his eyes again, waiting for it.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” the voice said, thick Dixie accent bending the words just so. “I do believe you could sleep through the apocalypse.”
Broussard sat up.
Tim Darby grinned, shirtless and sweaty like he always was, cheap jailhouse tattoos cut by jungle rot scars quivering like broken earthworms dying on wet cement. He was cleaning his rifle again, the third time today, each piece set out in precise rows. He was a tidy sort, this filthy man. Hard to get a handle on, all busy hands keeping away from the devil’s business but probably planning something far worse inside his mind. Darby raised his eyebrows at Broussard, pointed two greasy fingers into the air, his smile growing as the sound increased, stirring up whatever was inside of him. It was a terrible thing to witness. “The angels of death have arrived!”
Broussard looked up at the tent roof. The moth was gone.
Willie Render entered the tent, walked right past Darby and grabbed his pack. “Come on, Crayfish, we gotta go.”
Render called Broussard “Crayfish” because Broussard was from Louisiana, and apparently everyone from Philadelphia, where Render grew up, was entirely certain that people from Louisiana, and especially the bayou, ate crawfish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, excepting Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas. Broussard didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was “crawfish,” not “crayfish,” because he knew from firsthand experience that things were different up north, and the truth wasn’t always clear about how things happened down south.
John McNulty, a pie-faced, packing-plant white guy from Chicago built like a loaf of Wonder Bread, had giggled about the nickname, muttering something about being a “bottom feeder…hiding under rocks.” Render had threatened to kick his dumb cracker ass, so McNulty kept his giggles to himself. Being six-two and built like a middle linebacker—a position which he did in fact play at St. Joseph’s Prep and two years at Temple before being drafted by Uncle Sam after blowing out a knee and a suspicious registration error at the school—got people into line double-quick, even dumb, pie-faced crackers like McNulty. Established lines broke down during war, and the laws of the jungle came back into play when all the blood leaking into the jungle was just as red and just as scared. Pure Darwinism, from the officer class on down. Probably from higher up than that.
Broussard looked through the tent opening, out into the swirling dust and noise sweeping the clay skull top that that made up Con Thien. “What are they?” he said, thinking of giant pink moths, hovering above the tents and ammo dumps, sucking up the insides of each structure with a long proboscis.
Render clamped his hand on the top of his helmet, fighting against the rising wind that blew through the hooch. “What?”
Broussard pointed outside, to the noise and swirl. “What’s coming?”
Render laughed, the sound of it drowned out. “Our ride,” he shouted as he stepped out of the tent.