THE CREED of VIOLENCE
ALSO BY BOSTON TERAN
God Is a Bullet
Never Count Out the Dead
The Prince of Deadly Weapons
Trois Femmes
Giv: The Story of a Dog and America
CREED
VIOLENCE
of
BOSTON TERAN
TO
The original Rawbone, whom I hunted for years
AND TO
Lazaro, for that box of penny postcards and the tale of Senor Death
Though this is a work of fiction, certain details, backgrounds, places, and particular events are based on historical fact.
PART I
ONE
He was raised in a brothel behind Saloon Number 6. His mother was a whore, his father one of the nameless who knew her bed. The boy was nine when she died from a knife wound over money.
He took to living in a crate of wood slats he'd cobbled together under some trees near the riverbank. He carried slops and beer for pay; there was no job too menial, none too difficult. When the pestilence came he earned wages helping an army doctor with the sick and dying.
Death did not frighten him. Its heady reek meant nothing. He was much like the landscape he'd been born of, a vision hostile and burned. And of those narrow streets that are the souls of men he had seen much and learned.
He huddled alone in that tiny hut with only a ratty blanket about him. His dreams were tortuous and often sad, his childhood waylaid by reality. Most nights he was left to watching the kerosene lamps in the windows of that filthy hamlet and what stories were told there.
The boy hated his name. After his mother died he never spoke it. A prizefighter came to Fort McKavett. His face was battered, the cheeks swollen and craggy. He was not a large man, but he had enormous scarred fists and a thick back. On the parade grounds he fought a much bigger man in the baking sun. The boy watched as the fighters stalked each other round by round over that shadowless dust. It was all blood and exhaustion. But the smaller man would not be defeated and it came to be that the boy saw himself in that knotted frame, and when finally the other fighter succumbed, dropping to his knees on the blood-soaked earth, the boy experienced a place of power within himself that he could never have imagined existed. The fighter's name was Rawbone, and from that day forward it was what the boy called himself.
Not long after that he killed his first man. A drunk who'd wandered lost, after his time with a whore, down to the river darkness. He knifed the man as his own mother had been knifed and then he stole his money. The coins had blood on them and he washed them in the river till they shined.
THE ROAD OUT of Sierra Blanca followed its course through bleached and silent reaches toward the Rio Grande. From a promontory Rawbone watched an approaching island of dust rising up and away with the wind. It was 1910 and there was chaos throughout the border country of Texas.
Through the rivery heat of a white noon Rawbone began to make out details amidst the dust. It was a truck, a three-tonner. One of those new Packards, or maybe an Atlas, all bulked down and lashed with goods. The open cab was shaded by a tarp stretched across a frame supported by metal stanchions welded to the chassis. The gray tarp fluttered madly like some magic carpet. There were two men in the cab, a driver on the right and the other on the left with his boots up on the dash.
It was the one beside the driver who saw first this figure walking into the shadowless void of the road far ahead, waving a hat. He pointed.
"Now what might that be?" said the driver.
The other reached for a carbine and straddled it across his legs. They continued through the heat a long while until they came upon a raggedy, meager-looking fellow whose most prominent features were a huge forehead and tightly boned eyes.
The truck slowed and the men stared with hard vigilance as the fellow in the road called, "Please, stop." As the truck drew close Rawbone saw how its sides had been built partway up with a protective casing made from thin sheets of metal and painted in broad letters down the length of that casing on each side of the truck body were the words AMERICAN PARTHENON.
"Aye, brothers," said Rawbone as the truck finally braked. "It's Christian of you to stop. I lost my mount there in the hills." He pointed with his derby to a saddle and bridle lying by the side of the road. "I could use a ride and as for being a bummer"-he took from the inside lip of his filthy derby paper money-"I'll pay whatever it's worth to touch down in civilization."
The men in the cab glanced at each other, weighing out their reservations. The driver, a heavy, tired-looking fellow, waved him up.
RAWBONE WAS PERCHED upon the flatbed right behind the open cab. He was neither a tall man nor powerful. On the contrary, he was lean to the point of gauntness and his eyes were the color of some coming gale.
"So," he said, tapping his knuckles against one of the lashed crates, "what are ya carrying?"
"The makings of an icehouse to be built in El Paso that was wrongly shipped to Sierra Blanca."
From his frayed coat Rawbone took a flask and opened it. "I'll bet," he said, offering the men a drink, "when you first saw me you thought I was a breath of trouble."
The man beside the driver took the flask and drank. "We had a passing moment."
"Brothers," said Rawbone. "I've lived an unchristian life from time to time for sure. You might say I've sipped at perdition more than once." The driver drank and passed the flask back to Rawbone. "But God has seen fit to whisper a warning."
The truck slumped and rose along that pitted road into the haze of the desert slow and cumbersome while Rawbone, passing the flask again so the others might drink, listened and watched as his companions commiserated and complained about the coming revolution to the south. How with all that poverty and upheaval the Mex were now crossing the border in woeful numbers to steal jobs and insinuate themselves into the well-being of a culture that despised them. Them, with their fleshy skin and stinkin' food and brown filth and guttery lifestyle that harbored deficiencies and crime, them who meant to leech on the nation like a storm of poison.
"Well," said the driver, to all this, "God has a long memory."
Rawbone said little, preferring silence, and watching the flask go back and forth. In truth, to him, the nation meant nothing and race even less. He was the specificity of the flesh. All survive and live, and beyond that there was only death.
And yet, somewhere within this immoral selfishness there existed an outlaw place that would not die no matter how he tried to destroy it. It was like some ancient rune imprinted upon his being or a halfforgotten melody coming through the darkness.
The Mexican woman he'd married and left behind without so much as a word, the child he abandoned with one turn of a phrase. They existed yet in the sentimental mist that murdered him with quiet nightmares.
"Stop the truck," said the man beside the driver. "I'm feelin' bad."
He looked it. There was a pallor to him and a sweat ringing his temples. As the rig braked he stepped from the cab with an uncertain motion and started off carrying his carbine by its shoulder strap so it near dragged along the ground. His steps began to be dazed and then he fell and Rawbone jumped from the back and was over him before the driver could disembark.