Donnybrook: A Novel (18 page)

Fu fingered the jagged pieces of metal from the box. Some long, some short, but all skin-parting sharp. He didn’t have his needles. But these would work. He slid several of them into his shirt pocket, then turned to Pete with a long black extension cord in his hand. The cord had been divided into three wires and each was attached to a razor-pointed turtle hook. Pointed the homemade tool at Pete and said, “I will give you one more chance to tell me how to get to the Donnybrook.”

Pete sucked mucus and said, “Up yours, slit-eye. Ain’t telling you shit!”

Fu closed his eyes. Found that silent state within that wanted to use hurt and create discipline. Opened his eyes, and told Pete, “You will tell me after I’ve taught you the language of respect.”

Pete tried to twist his upper body but it was no use as he slobbered and screamed, “I get loose, gonna get me some Crisco and a Fry Daddy, make your Fu Manchu ass talk ten kinds of fried tongue.”

Fu turned, laid the extension cord back on the counter, reached into his shirt pocket for a fish hook, kneeled down in front of Pete, laughed, and grabbed Pete’s right foot with his left hand. He thought about forcing Pete’s toes back toward his shin, listen to them pop, see how much he could take, but this wasn’t about pain, the hooks would suffice, he just needed information. Wanted Pete to talk. He curved the first turtle hook down into the gritty flesh of Pete’s heel with his right hand. Fu listened to the callused skin give, watched a drop of blood drip and dot from the heel to the floor, and stared silently as Pete’s bladder gave and he screamed, “What the shit you doin’ to me?”

Fu asked once more, “How do I get to the Donnybrook?”

*   *   *

The butt of the rifle whiplashed Angus’s head. His sawed-off hit the ground. McGill’s men swarmed him. Held him down. Tied his wrists. Freed Ned’s leg. Two men hefted Liz’s body from the ground and McGill told them, “Plant a bullet in her brain, we’ll take her back and feed her to the hogs, she’s beyond repair.”

Now Angus and Ned sat side by side in McGill’s barn with their hands bound behind them. Liz lay in a feed trough out back, a tiny hole bored into her brain by one of McGill’s men.

Outside, nightfall swallowed the countryside. Onlookers sat around fires with the beaten, who held cubes of ice against their abrasions, slugging down bottles of booze to ease their hurt. Minus Ned, all the winners celebrated up at the stables with their trainers, most of them with the same ritual of ice and liquor. They all waited for sunrise, when the next four bouts of the Donnybrook could begin.

McGill held the rucksack open in front of Angus, pulled a baggie of meth from it, and said, “What you’re telling me is Ned and your sister left you for dead. Took your dope. You hunted them down to here. Could’ve been a wasted effort had you pulled that trigger up on the hill and ceased my existence, ’cause my men woulda filled you full of shell shot.”

Angus parted his devil’s smirk and said, “What’s in that ruck belongs to me. No one else. I cooked it. I earned it. It’s mine.”

McGill closed the rucksack. Laid it on the wooden table next to the whiskey.

Two of McGill’s men sat upturning cans of Old Milwaukee with Lang. Passed a pint bottle of whiskey back and forth. Gritty moisture irritated their bodies. Blister-eyed, Lang said, “You sure started some shit, Angus, but it was fun watching you in action.”

The barn door creaked open. Two armed men and a girl with a busted nose and Angus’s .45 tucked down her waistband entered carrying canvas sacks, drawstrings tied tight around the tops. They closed the door behind them. McGill winked at the girl and asked, “That all of it?”

The girl replied, “All of today’s and tonight’s betting. Be wheelbarrows more come tomorrow.”

McGill told her, “Take it to the back with the rest. Start counting.”

The girl nodded. Walked herself and the other two to the rear of the barn. Unlocked a door. In his peripheral vision Angus watched them disappear into the back room. Heard the door bolt from the opposite side.

McGill palmed Angus’s face. Smiled. “Don’t worry about my money. Worry about what’s in that ruck. How bad you want it. ’Cause you owe me a life for the one you dragged through the gate.”

Lang said, “Told you not to cross McGill.”

Angus jerked his face from McGill’s grip and spat, “I owe you shit.”

McGill fingered some meth from the baggie, pushed it beneath Ned’s nose, and said, “Inhale, Ned. Gotta keep your heart beating till tomorrow.” To Angus he said, “Always wondered what became of you after the accident. Sorry about your sister. Sounds like bad skin to be rubbing with anyways. We did you a solid.”

Angus was surprised. “You didn’t fuck her?”

McGill said, “I don’t lay with filth.”

Angus said, “Everyone else has.”

Ned inhaled the crank into both nostrils and laughed. “Her sours has become spoils.”

McGill fingered more meth from the baggie for Ned, looked at Angus, and said, “Here’s how it’s gonna go. You want your revenge and ruck of crank, you gonna fight for me.”

Angus turned his head, tilted it sideways up to McGill, said, “Ain’t no doing. I cooked that dope you keep wasting on this lazy swimmer.”

Ned snorted hard and started bucking his chair, his leg a bleeding sore wrapped in rags. With razor-thin eyes patted purple, he looked over at Angus and said, “Let my hands loose, I beat you into a plate of mashed taters.”

McGill told Angus, “I ain’t asking, I’m telling. Come tomorrow, when the sun meets its peak, you and Ned fight in a Hound Round. Whoever is standing when all the blood is fertilizing crushed stone gets to live and keep the ruck.”

Angus asked McGill, “The shit’s a Hound Round?”

Wired, Ned started to stutter and jerk. His eyelids breached wide, revealed large orbs of busted blood vessels. His gums bled crimson as McGill pressed a palm over his broken lips, told Angus, “Let’s just say, even if you refuse to fight, it’ll get messy after three minutes.”

*   *   *

Pete’s lips pressed uneven beneath five single bulbs that hung, spread out, from high rafters. His teeth bit down, lockjawed. His arms hung flaccid at his sides. The muscles of his abs and legs rang tight with hurt from the fear of what Fu was doing with the hooks. Only there was little if any pain. Only a prick, then he’d lose feeling somewhere in his body.

Beyond the open door, fireflies lit up the dead shades of night. Dogs barked from far off and crickets violined with Pete’s redneck chorus of racial slurs from inside the garage.

One hook started at the ball of Pete’s foot, below the middle toe, another curved into the arch, and the third into the heel. The red from Pete’s foot started to dot onto the garage’s cracked floor, then subsided. The last hook had caused a clear liquid to run from the corners of his soldered eyes and mouth, down his chest and abdomen. He’d no control over it.

Fu exhaled with irritation and asked Pete again, “How do I get to the Donnybrook?”

Pete sucked knurled jelly strands back into his nose, unable to comprehend what the Chinaman was doing to him, how these hooks could maybe sting but not really hurt and he tried to spit but coughed, and said, “Daddy always told of them gooks he killed in ’Nam. Said they’d take damn near an entire clip to quit moving. He made me just as tough, you squid-eyed piece of shit!”

Fu smiled, fanned his index finger back and forth, and said, “I find that most amusing, seeing as I’m Chinese, not Vietnamese. Regardless of your ignorance, we will see.” He fingered another gold-colored hook from his pocket, lifted Pete’s left hand that was weighted from being immobile. Pressing the sharp point into the turnaround between the man’s thumb and index finger, Fu bull’s-eyed a meridian that caused Pete’s left eye to droop, his mouth to sag, and his jaw to drop. He appeared as though his left side was melting.

Pete mumbled, “Fupp you doob too … meee?”

“The Donnybrook. You nod, I take out the hook, return your face and speech to normal, you tell me how to get there.”

Pete tried to spit on Fu, but could not form, let alone use, the muscles that it took and only drooled even more down his peach-pit chin and fumbled curses that made him sound like a child struggling with his learning curve for speech’s consonants and vowels.

Fu was running out of time, had wasted too much on this backwoods miscreant. But in many ways he was impressed by the roughneck’s fortitude to take what Fu had given and not be broken.

From behind came the lag of boots stumbling. Turning around, Fu eyed Whalen in the doorway. “Hell you doin’ with this pasty fuck?”

Fu positioned himself, lined his torso to go straight into Whalen, to blind the eyes, take the throat. Looked as if he’d tried to sneak up on him. “Trying to break him, get directions to the Donnybrook.”

Whalen was beaten and worn, Fu knew this, but somehow the man had dragged himself from the truck, made it to the garage. He watched Whalen use the makeshift counter to balance himself upright, pick up a bright-blue plastic handle that looked like an oversized Maglite with a three-foot white rod connected to it, two rounded pieces of copper at its tip. He stared at Fu, who made a fist with his left, his right loosened, his fingers would segregate the man’s center, take away his air. Whalen glanced at Pete, took in the hooks embedded within him, plugged in the device, thumbed a button on the plastic handle. Electricity arced between the copper tips. Fu was ready to kill when Whalen said, “Why the shit ain’t you usin’ this to loosen his tongue?”

Fu relaxed, saw he was not a threat to him, told him, “It is not about torture, it is about direction.”

“The fuck it ain’t.” Whalen stumbled toward Pete. “I’ll treat you like an animal not wanting to follow its herd.”

Pete tried to twist his head from side to side but had no control of his body.

Fu gripped Whalen’s shoulder. Whalen said, “Let’s try it my way.” He prodded Pete with the penny-colored tip. Making him dart. Splotched his flesh with a nickel-sized pinch of rubber-tire burn-out. Pete flexed stiff and tried to pull himself from the chair as he tried to scream, but it came out mumbled: “Summ … muvvv … uhhh … bbshhhh!”

Fu removed the fish hook from Pete’s hand and Pete’s speech returned. His crooked lips parted and he gasped and whimpered. “You go out the way you come … hang a right out the end of the drive. Follow Old Engine Road for five miles back…”

After Pete told Fu and Whalen how to get to the Donnybrook, he pleaded, “You … gonna let me … g-g-go now, right?”

Whalen shook his head, turned around, laid the juice zapper back on the workbench, nearly fainted. Fu caught him, propped him in the doorway. Turned back to Pete and began removing the hooks from his body. Returning his feeling with each pull, except for his dislocated arms.

Standing over him, Fu took in the moist lines of Pete’s hair that veined across his forehead. The smell of burnt self all around him.

Pete tried to inhale. Got choked. The corners of his mouth appeared greased. From behind, Whalen slurred, “Hell you doin’, Chinaman?”

“Thinking how this man who proclaims himself as Pete, how he is either stubborn or disciplined.”

Pete puckered his lips. Lined his head to Fu’s shape. In his mind he argued with himself. This shouldn’t have happened. How did he let it? It couldn’t end this way. Bound and beat by two men just as crazed and misanthropic as himself.
No!

Pete wondered what this slant-eyed man was getting at, whether he’d release him or not. Feeling wrung out, he formed what saliva he could and spit at Fu.

Specks of slobber dotted Fu’s face. He forearmed the wet from his complexion. Held an idea in his mind, looked up into the garage rafters. Noticed a steel wire with a clamp-hook hanging above him. It was attached to a come-along that was bolted to a four-by-four stud that ran along the wall. Fu turned away from Pete and started searching about the garage. Found a large military green canvas bag. He opened it. Emptied its contents: soiled and moldy desert-patterned fatigues, combat boots, canteen, and MREs. He grabbed a pair of tin snips from the garage’s work-counter. Cut the wire from Pete’s shins and chest. Watched Pete pummel to the concrete floor, inhaling his stenched, violet body. Pete’s face was creased with tears. He wailed as Fu worked the canvas over his head. Tried to kick and squirm. Fu punched and palmed him, knowing Pete had little left in him, as he worked the bag down over Pete’s legs.

Whalen thought Fu was wasting time. “The fuck are you doing?”

Fu bound the top of the canvas bag with more fence wire. Lowered the hook down from the rafter, hooked the fence wire on the bag, and worked the come-along’s handle, lifting Pete up from the ground, suspending him into the air as he did all the others. Letting them meditate on all their wrongs, what had brought him to them, a second chance of learning through pain. Conditioning. And he told Whalen, “I think he will make a good prospect, maybe I’ll come for him later.”

“Prospect for what?”

“My business.”

As Pete hung from the rafter, his words were garble-tongued. Fu stood in the garage’s open door, helping Whalen to his feet, led him back to the truck, distanced himself from the pebbles-in-a-blender tone of a possible student.

PART III

PANDEMONIUM

20

Saturday of the Donnybrook brought a heat wave of swollen hands, black eyes, and hulled lips. The fourth free-for-all of fresh bodies had entered the ring. Beat on one another till only one remained standing in frayed cutoffs and slick-bottomed boots. Flecks of blood and bone shadowed the spiderweb tattoos that coiled up each of his ball-bat forearms, twisted and tied into the railroad spikes that nailed into his right and left shoulders. They had been inked by a tattoo-artist friend wanting the same thing he wanted, getting out of the Kentucky hills. It was Jarhead Johnny Earl.

Goat and Walkup stood with Angus while Ned sat tied in the barn, getting fingernails of meth from Scar. Angus watched McGill pat Jarhead on the back and say, “Got two more free-for-alls, then get to see you fight for a lot of crumpled green, boy.”

Jarhead hadn’t come all this way robbing, smuggling, and listening to the prophecies of a backwoods soothsayer only to be treated like a child. He told McGill, “Ain’t your boy.”