Still, the talk-show host loved going to the studio, loved it even more of late. It was a haven, a cloister, a funkily pristine cell sealed off from the world of loan sharks and mildew, losing bets and sudden hammering downpours. The studio walls were soundproofed, heavily padded in vinyl like a Barcalounger all around. The lights were recessed and soft as stars. Wires were taped down, chair casters always oiled; nothing raided, nothing squeaked. Intercourse with the universe beyond was blessedly one-way: Yates's voice went fluently forth and nothing came back in. It was safe, it was controlled, and the host had come to crave his time in the studio like a therapy junkie craves his time on the couch, as the only respite from the mayhem and disquiet of his other waking hours.
And now Yates was just finishing the show. The guests had left; he was wrapping up with an improvised and not terribly persuasive ramble on the pleasures of the rainy season. He glanced up at the clock above the engineer's window, and in one crammed and befuddling instant he saw two things: He saw that it was twenty seconds before seven, and he saw that Bruno had invaded the production booth.
The huge thug stood there behind the triple-thick glass, his massive arms crossed over his breakfront of a chest. He had commandeered the engineer's headset, the earpieces drew attention to the way his neck tapered to his head. The quailing engineer, a trouper, managed to hit the switch that started Yates's theme music, and Bruno's face took on an expression that was uncomprehending yet transfixed, it bore the smallbrained ecstasy of an ape at the opera.
The ecstasy didn't last long.
"Yo, crumbfuck." Bruno said it through the intercom, and at the moment the barking voice bounced off the soft walls Ray Yates's cloister was desecrated, his safe haven was spoiled forever.
The violation made Yates mad; he mustered a flash of feistiness that felt heroic but vanished as quickly as a hot pee in a cold ocean, chilled to nothing by his fear.
"We got a meeting tuh go tuh," Bruno barked. "Ya ready?"
It was buggy in the vacant lot at dusk, but Roberto Natchez, dressed in black, didn't seem to notice. Mosquitoes buzzed unharassed around his hair, landed on his neck and bit; tropical roaches the size of mice slithered among ground-hugging vines and over red-veined roots the thickness and consistency of garden hoses. Fetid puddles between jagged chunks of ancient coral sent forth a nasty smell of sulfur. Undaunted, the poet continued on his mission. In one hand he held a wire cage, in the other a bag of popcorn.
He found a small clearing, knelt, and set his trap.
He sprinkled some kernels to draw his prey to the first chamber of the cage. A more generous helping lured the quarry to the second, narrower compartment. The mother lode of popcorn was piled temptingly on the far side of a small spring-loaded platform attached to the trip wire that would slam the door.
Content with his snare, Natchez retreated to the shadow of his building and waited. It was time, he had decided, to put theory into practice. Credos, manifestos were necessary, of course; they provided the rigorous logic without which human activity was just so much pathetic silliness, so much blundering around. Still, at some point there was no substitute for action; action alone could prove the rightness and integrity of intellect.
It was perhaps three minutes before the chicken appeared from underneath a canopy of weeds and started walking jerkily, obliquely, toward the popcorn. In the dim mix of fading dusk and distant streetlight, the bird looked dull brown and unkempt; its leg feathers were ragged and there was something unseemly, slatternly, about the drunken way it waddled. Roberto Natchez felt exhilarated: He watched the chicken and realized he would have no trouble killing it.
No trouble at all, and that was fitting. He was a true artist, and the true artist shrank from nothing. The true artist protected the pure from the impure, the worthy from the fake. There was between those things a gulf as broad and absolute as the gulf between life and death, and to perform his sacred duty the artist had to know both sides of that dread chasm. He had to be willing to hold death in his hands. Only then could he consign the true and the false to their proper places.
He watched the chicken. It had reached the far end of the ribbon of bait and cautiously, deliberately at first, was beginning to eat. It dropped its head, grabbed a kernel with its beak, then vigilantly stood erect again and looked around before it began the strenuous and unattractive job of chewing. Its horny jaw labored up and down and sideways, shreds of popcorn fell out the edges of its mouth.
The feeding gained momentum, the bird's vigilance soon gave way to gluttony. Now the chicken ate like a famished child, never lifting its eyes from the food; on its yellow feet it followed the zigs and zags of the popcorn trail and soon had entered the outer chamber of the trap.
Here it paused, and Roberto Natchez held his breath. For what seemed a long time, the bird just stood there. Could it be that it was sated? Was it bothered, perhaps, by some change in the light as it filtered through the slender wire bars? Caught up in the clenched and sanguinous excitement of the hunt, Natchez narrowed his black eyes and willed the chicken onward.
The chicken obeyed. It dropped its head and pecked at the little pile of popcorn at its feet, then, before it was halfway finished, seemed to be distracted by the bigger pile on the far side of the metal platform. It edged forward, placed a single three-clawed foot on the trigger, then leaned over daintily and not without a certain grace, rather like a dancer bowing low across one leg. Natchez watched and felt his bitten neck grow hot with anxiety as kernel after kernel disappeared and still the trap did not clatter shut. Then, finally, inevitably, the chicken overreached itself. Straining to seize the last few morsels, it brought its other foot onto the steel plate; the trip wire let go with a muffled twang and the door fell closed with tinny finality.
Roberto Natchez exhaled like a dragon. He was just slightly dizzy and he saw gold-green streamers behind his eyes. He did not feel the ground as he strode forward to claim his prize.
The chicken was still eating, did not seem to know that it was doomed. Not until its captor bent low and cast his giant shadow did the bird realize anything was wrong. Then it wheeled in its small space and saw that its escape was blocked. It retreated, squawked, flapped its futile wings so that its feather tips raked unmusically against the bars. It leaped in an aborted takeoff and banged its narrow head against the top of the trap. The poet considered the moment, examined his emotions. So this was how it felt to be in charge, to be enforcer, judge, and executioner. He liked it.
Squatting down, he opened the cage and gingerly reached inside. The bird shrieked and pecked at his fingers. The beak was half sharp, like the tines of a fork; the feel of it was less painful than bracing. He thrust his hand in more decisively and grabbed the chicken by the neck. He felt vertebrae beneath the scraggly feathers as he pulled his victim through the wire door.
It had been Roberto Natchez's intention to make the killing ceremonial, to invest it with the dignity and slowness of a rite. He realized now with a certain self-embarrassment that that would be impossible. The chicken, its red eye fiery with terror, squirmed and swelled, and Natchez was amazed at the quantity of senseless stubborn life that pulsed within it. Its wings pressed against his grip in bony supplication, its absurd pebbled legs still tried to run. To hold the creature was appalling; its relentless squawking was a mayhem that made a travesty of any sort of pomp, and Natchez admitted that the bird and not himself was dictating the pace of its decease. Less like a priest than a butcher, the poet pushed the chicken flat against the ground and with his other hand he made a motion like opening a jar of jam and wrung its neck.