THE HATCHET MAN, TALLOI SHEKU ENGURA by Andrew Freiman
Night was the mouth of death. Everything was lost there. Footsteps came from far away, cries from other countries, other times; occasionally the blasts of gunfire from far away. Then, closer, the desperate muzzle flashes eating through the air—the only light for miles. The only light in the entire world.
His body was dissolved. Invisible. As though he had descended some large stair, had gone further and further into a world of nothing. A world of not world, without property, without any senses, with a spirit unaware of its boundaries. This had happened years ago. It was happening now. How far away everything seemed, how compact the future, how close the past. How long had it been sitting like this? Sitting in the dark awaiting a hut or two huts or all of them, all at once, one just after the other, in a strange obscure series, to blaze up, like normal, just as he was told. All of the boys around him, two feet, three feet, spread out for miles, he didn’t know, of course not, not like this, but they were there—waiting like him. Smelling the smell of spring, so far removed and completely lost, now generally described as wet and nothing else—not even sweet. Pulling it into their lungs and pushing it out as an intruder. These young boys, as lost as dumb dogs, waiting for the huts to light on fire, waiting for the screams, the rush of wind running toward the light, further and further (not out of his anti-world, not into something new, but towards the blank faces and the white eyes of those he was sent for).
His one memory, pulled out of the bloodied ether, somehow still there, kept safe in quiet part of his brain, kept alive through repetition, through constant visitation, was of his childhood. A simple scene of his grandmother’s house in Freetown: a rose garden, a pool constantly being filled with water, a tern about to land on the roof, the sound of a family member’s voice. Since the fighting began, this memory, the very thought of some other place had changed: at first it kept him safe, it allowed him to remember what he was, where he was from, that there was a another world someplace. But now it was only a reminder that he had nothing. It had become, through years of sleepless nights, brutal mornings, the cries and sobs of dying people, it had become something that pushed him forward—it made the war easy. Revolving in his mind, he thought of each piece, and looked toward the percussion of bullets and sat still, anticipating what was to come. And with each piece of his memory, what was there, Talloi became less and less, he became more and more terrifying, brutal. They took this from you, he told himself. It is their fault, no one can ever doubt it, that you are like this. One hand resting on his machete, the other mindlessly playing in the dirt. A breath was drawn from somewhere, coming out of all of the boys around him.
They were closer than he thought. And a flame rose from the ground and jumped up into the sky spreading out and defining the true extent of the darkness. Bodies exploded from the light and the boys, all of them, were up and running as one large body, with one mind and one purpose, screaming, smiling, their eyes and teeth reflecting the golden light, moist and coming quicker and quicker. Flooding from the night like locusts, small boys, no older than ten years old, frail and weak, suddenly animated into a demonic presence. As they advanced, more huts went up in flames, and their shadows, like dancing men, were thrown out into the surrounding land, long, grotesque, unfaltering.
It was then that night became night—finally something other than just blackness, again, the dimensions defined, the sound spreading out like dye in water, screams filling up all of space, and eternity, filing back into the past, running ahead into the future, staining the land itself. Hut after hut went up in flames, the inhabitants scratching through the dust in the posture of cockroaches, scurrying on all fours with terror in their throats. Looking up into the sky to find nothing, to maybe find a neighbor or friend dying. To catch the scent of flesh on fire. To see, in the strange bewildering motion of recognition, a child spattered with blood shooting a man in the head and running off to find another victim. And, like always, just outside the light, riding that impenetrable line between darkness and light, the older men with the stern faces of fathers that had set everything into motion. They had formed a barrier that would not allow any villagers through. The din of murder continued as women were raped in the still-hot ashes of their homes, the girls murdered, the children murdered, the dogs, the goats, everything. Talloi only thought of the roses slowly being covered with soot, the pool filling with blood, the bird screaming out that he was a king, a king, a king. The motions easy, a mix of ecstasy and horror, as he slowly wandered between the flames and found those not yet dead. A young girl, her clothes entirely red, her arms outstretched and her fingers splayed into the dirt. White eyes staring up and into the void of the sky, grasping. He knelt next to her head and touched her hair.
“Hello.”
She stared upward, but did not respond. In her eyes there was something that he had seen before, but had never been able to name. A smile spread across his lips.
“Do you know what they call me?”
Flames licking the sky, the ring of dancing shadows leaping and lunging all around them. The girl coughed with blood splattering and beading up in the dust.
“I was named Talloi. But then they started to call me Hatchet Man.”
The smile wider. The blade, already red, seemed to melt in the gold light. So close, the heat bearing down on them, their ears filling with the sound of it, as though surrounded by millions of mouths gnashing and feeding.
“It is because I don’t like guns. The noise makes me nervous.”
She writhed on the ground so as to flee, her mouth opening to throw her voice uselessly into the smoke. It was as though the blade didn’t move at all. As though everything was already decided.
And in the east, despite everything, despite absolutely everything, there was a pale glow, and again, the sun began to rise. Without consideration for the dead. Without asking the living. The laughter finally ending. The children again sitting in the dust, again awaiting the ridiculous waste of lives as the sun would soon stretch out and uncover the world for what it was before and what it was after.
One of the younger boys was crying. The group had been hiking through the jungle for the better part of the morning. All of them were hungry and tired, loose as a pile of thread. They had crossed a river by balancing on a log. It was a short distance but the youngest boy had lost his balance and had fallen with his legs apart, landing with the tree between them. The pain was excruciating, but the shame was worse. The older boys laughed at him, saying things like, “The baby has smashed his little jewels,” or “Now you don’t have to worry about making the girls pregnant, you’ve broken them for good.” The older men ignored everything, hoisting their large guns onto their shoulders and disappearing into the trees. While the boys followed and continued to jeer over their shoulders, Talloi fell back and put his hand on the young boy’s shoulder.
“You shouldn’t cry Little Rebel. There is no need. Men don’t cry.”
Little Rebel stopped for a moment, and opened his locked fingers to peer through a small crack at Talloi’s face.
“But I am not a man. I’m younger than you.”
“If you fight with us, with any one of us. You are a man. Only a man can kill like you do. You should know that.”
At this he stopped crying and the two of them moved side by side, holding their machetes out, sometimes moving them through the air to widen the deep path that they walked. Trees stretched over their heads to block out the sky with millions of leaves, each a different color of green, shaking in the wind, shattering the sun light into smaller and smaller pieces so that it didn’t fall on them directly. The group moved on, one after the other, as though being pulled or as though pushing, through the heat, through the deep trough, the maze of the jungle; they marched dumbly forward with expressionless faces and the spattering of blood hard on their clothes. Lifting and letting fall their earthen feet, their clumsy drenched and aching soles barely marking the dirt as they moved further into the jungle and toward camp. Weapons and ammunition strung across their thin frames, rattling at each foot fall, occasionally catching light and holding it there for a second, or less. Each of them existed as a small ill-formed composite—they had fashioned themselves into warriors as best they could. Some of them with boots, most barefoot, others wearing sandals. A bare back here and there in the slow line. One boy, toward the head of the line walking with his chest out, his red shirt proudly displaying the body of Mickey Mouse. Some heads bare, others with ball caps or bandanas or green pith helmets from wars unknown. Another boy holding a string of severed hands—his usual trophy. Another still covered by a blanket stolen from the town.
The procession continued through the trees for so long that no one thought of anything other than the simplest command of movement, to move forward, to not stop. Voiceless again, as voiceless as they were the night before, as dumb, as blind. Even in the sunlight they moved with open mouths and sweat wetting the dried blood, both dripping off of their noses and falling onto the plants that surrounded them. Finally, their backs stooped and their heads tied to their bodies with fraying string, the men told them to stop and rest for a moment. Whether the boys heard them or not didn’t matter, seeing one of them stopped, going against the limitless command of movement, made them too drop their loads one by one. All of the items of their small and bloody war falling with distinct noises, distinct silences, and the boys fell too, in one great motion as one single creature pulled from the depths. Talloi and the young boy sat together sharing a canteen of water, and stared dumbly together at the ground between them, while the other boys shared cigarettes and tried to talk like warriors. Occasionally one would say something daring, something to solidify their present blood-painted bodies, “I have never had a family, but you. My brother killers.” Or there would be a child who would refute, directly, his entire life up until that point. “I was never alive until I was taken into this war. In this is my beginning.” Still, a boy nicknamed, “The Priest”, with his trophy of hands, stood up in front of all of the reclining figures, the severed hands around his neck, laying on his shallow, shirtless chest, standing before them so as to address them all. “The whole earth,” he said, “is our slaughter house. God, the rich man, has given it to us.” The boys cheered while he continued, “If we do good, he will not leave us; he will save us.”
His words always seemed to bolster the group, to pull back into their faces, some strange warmth that made them seem all the more human. Talloi and Little Rebel watched blankly, staring with flies on their skin, while The Priest finished his small speech by putting his cigarette out on the hand dangling over his left breast. Talloi looked around the group and at the older men further off, always apart from them. He tried to remember what was said to him before all of this had become his life. Of course, he had had a family, his grandmother in Freetown at least. But no matter what, he could not remember what had happened to his mother and father, if they had ever existed. Even without being able to remember them, he was sure that there was a life outside of the killing and the long nights and the mindless walks from blood to blood, from waking to sleeping, but that didn’t really matter. If he couldn’t remember it maybe it wasn’t real. He could convince himself of that; it was easy enough to believe that only rifles and gun smoke and dying people’s last breaths were the only things that were real. But the roses, and the pool, and the tern all disagreed. He looked at the young boy, around his age when he first became part of the group, his downward eyes, the round shaved head, the smile that knew of two things hiding both well enough: happiness and fear.
“Do you remember your family, Little Rebel?”
The boy did not move his head for a long time. Talloi asked the question again, in a softer tone, quietly, so that the others were sure not to hear. And the boy’s voice came out like a thin drop of water.
“Yes. I can remember everything.”
“Your mother and father?”
He looked up at Talloi with his eyes wide and pleading, his face bright for the filth that covered it, he moved closer and talked in a whisper.
“Both of them.”
Talloi waited for the boy to continue but realized he would only speak if asked directly. All of the boys were afraid to speak of the past. It was a betrayal.
“Where they nice people, your family?”
“They laughed every morning. And we had a bath and food and I would have to change my clothes every day.”
“You can remember all of that, even in your small head?” asked Talloi, to which Little Rebel nodded his head quickly.
“Can you remember anything then?”
The other boys were playing with the severed hands, acting as though they wanted to make love to one of the boys who was sleeping, one hand on the boy’s crotch, the other on his cheek. They howled with laughter. Talloi watched them and mindlessly said, “No. I can say nothing of my home, my words are not enough.”
At this the boy asked, “You don’t remember your mother or father?”
“No. I’ve never known them.” Talloi cleared his throat and spat over his right shoulder watching as the white ball moved through the air and fell to the ground. “Let this go. Speaking like this only makes us weak. Go talk to the big man and ask for some palm wine to make us strong for the walk back to camp.”
He tried to think back, to remember more of his family, they had to be there, someone, somehow. He had to be born. He couldn’t have been the one person in all of time to exist quickly, without direction, without a future and a past. It was impossible. He had his grandmother’s back yard, the pool, the rose, the tern; maybe that is enough, he thought. Maybe I don’t need anything more than that. When he looked up from the ground and saw Little Rebel running back to him with the canteen of wine held above his head, he told himself that he was wrong. There are other things too, he told himself. There are other things too. He had realized, without being able to put it into words, that life is not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after. But that life was lived as a long line of events, from the beginning to the end.
A clearing in the trees. A large expanse of mud and shambled mud brick buildings with no windows. A series of posts like huge lances leaning into the ground held up an enormous network of camouflage netting that threw shade onto the ground. Behind the buildings were the trucks—some working, some in shambles; axle rods clotted with dirt obliquely grew from the refuse of their trash heap. The men had gone inside to clean their weapons and sleep, the radio playing softly from inside while a few of the boys drank more and more of the wine, falling deeper and deeper into drunken states that pushed some of them to their knees babbling like fools, and others still running into the sun and chasing each other like animals. Talloi stumbled toward the river, vomiting along the way, holding his head from the sun and the crushing feel of the wine. A cigarette in his hand smoldered unnoticed, the ash suspended like a bar of lead. He got up, leaning, and scrambled forward, falling, he moved up again. Further toward the brown river that sluiced its way through the country and toward the sea, moving with it all of time. He wheeled on the sun holding his hand up in salute:
“I do not believe in God. The river is the God. You could say… I do not believe. I do not. The nights are terrible,” spitting into the water, “kids, we are kids... The nights are dark. They are dark. You...YOU… I do not believe in god, not any more. Could you say something else? The boys are dead. We were dead. No. Yes… but we are living. I can’t understand it.” A sound pulled him from his conversation, and he looked across the river. “There is nothing over there. Just me, just me and you. And all of them asleep. Fuck you. Fuck you. Do you understand what I am saying? I’m a big man. I have a new name. Hatchet Man. Because I am good with a blade. The… a blade. In a year I may have to shave to my face. But today.” A sound from the camp, a curdled shout from Priest turned him around so quickly that he fell onto his back—flailing his legs in order to sit up and see what was happening.
“Mother fuckers! You cannot tell me that his parents are good. They are bad people! Why is he fighting if they are good? Stupid faggot, lying faggot. I’ll kill him tonight for that, no one ever lies to me.” Talloi cleared his throat and spat into the river again, this time pausing for a moment, doubled over, ready to vomit for the second time. Eventually he continued, “I have the ocean. Freetown was the ocean. Yes. That is right… It was on the water. There are boats. It is larger and longer and better than this river! Forever. Forever… Any direction. Here it’s just down down down...” Another noise from camp disturbed him. “Mother fuck!” he shouted, “Fuck. Fuck FUCK… Look at them. Priest is an idiot. He is dumb you know. God is not. He isn’t… There never was anything like that. Bullets. The river maybe. Maybe something else—like the ocean,” helplessly shrugging his shoulders, “or Freetown.”
Talloi stumbled again, this time falling into the water, up to his waist, thrashing about in it with the palms of his hands, then with his fists. His face turning grey, his eyes yellow and opaque to the light. Raising both of his hands, Talloi opened his mouth to say something, a last thing, a final piece to everything, swaying wildly. Control, if ever possessed, now completely gone. He struggled like this, to find the words to say, his blind tongue moving in his mouth searching there for something precious, until he finally became too weak, too tired, too small of a thing and fell over. Half in and half out of the river, completely drenched by the dirty water. Talloi fell asleep for the first time in two days.
At first there was nothing other than the pool in front of him. He was barefoot, the cool concrete underneath his feet. The pool again leaking constantly into the ground, and more quickly being refilled from a garden hose suspended over the side and dangling like a snake facing downward. He was there. The ocean only a few miles away, the high walls of the garden surrounding him. The terns in the sky with their bright eyes and their good vision, circling him, coming closer and further away. He could hear nothing except the hose. It was the sound of fire eating through a whole countryside. Then again it would change to nothing, and then to voices that he could not place. That he could not remember. That were nothing at all. He stepped forward, toward the pool, and set his feet against the edge looking down into its depths. Talloi jumped backwards and landed on his backside, trying to scoot away from the edge on all fours, but it was impossible. He was standing against the edge. Looking over and into the pool where there were bodies piled on top of bodies underneath the water. The hose was still pouring water, and the pool was still leaking. The bodies faceless without hands or feet. He looked up to see the tern above him. But saw only sky.
“Talloi Engura, do as I have told you!”
The old woman was mad, walking forward into the living room constantly. She would come from the kitchen, with a cup of tea in her hands, reach him, say the words, disappear to the kitchen. It happened back and forth, again and again. Talloi, this time sitting down at a table with his school work in front of him. Arithmetic. He hated his teacher and refused to learn.
“I am not your teacher,” she told him, “you can not tell me no.”
Speaking was impossible, Talloi realized this quickly—he wanted to tell his grandmother to stop coming and going like she did, he wanted her to stay, to tell her that he wanted her to stay, but it was impossible. He opened his mouth and then nothing happened.
“You know,” she confided, “you do not know the pain you have caused. You left as a traveler, not escaping into any future, you are not the same boy that I left at the station.”
A high loud crack traveled between them. He looked and saw only white. A distance there. Forever outwards. The sound of the ocean, and boats back and forth, sounding their horns. A red light. Two red lights. A weightless feeling like an empty stomach. A terrible pain across his face. And he receded into the black and saw the harbor teeming with life so far away. A voice unknown, entirely unknown, a woman’s maybe, telling him to pray for the ships so that the dark throat would no reject them. And he knelt in that nothing and he tried, but nothing happened. He could not. It wouldn’t work.
Inside the house, a new house, a cold house, there was a feeling he could not place. He was lost there, or something else was lost there. And he thought, suddenly, curiously, without passion, of the motions used to sharpen a blade, remembered above all else.
“You can not tell me no.”
The voice grew louder and louder and louder, until he clutched his head and cried out for it to stop.
The big man was asking him a question, but his voice was so far away that it didn’t make any sense at all. Talloi could feel his cold feet, wet and distant, stretched out. The pants clinging to his skin. His sore feet. The aching joints. The miserable feeling of a stomach long ago turned into a hovel already burning inside him. And he knew, without having to think very hard, that it was night outside and that it was dark like every other night, that the stars were hidden from view, ashamed. He knew that he was drunk, that he had fallen into the river. That time had passed, that it was always passing. That he could not go back in time and stop the palm wine from going down his throat like it was an endless cavern, impossible to navigate or fill. He knew that beyond all of it, inside all of it, him and the other boys, all the boys, inside the weapons and the crazed pastime of blood, something was wrong. The idea terrified him, it had come out of nowhere, impossible to expect, to prepare himself for it, to fortify against it. And quickly, without any fight, it had arrived, it had convinced him. His head split with pain. His eyes untrustworthy and filled with doubt, yellowed beyond eyes, smooth and glassless as stones were sealed shut. The lids refused to be lifted and refused to look ahead as the big man picked him up from the ground and carried him back to the quiet camp.
When he finally opened his eyes he saw that he was inside the big man’s room—the large clumsy bricks, the dark pale scent of gun oil and paper all around him. Talloi was on the bed with the covers thrown over his body, wrapping him loosely, but with a weight that pressed in on his body below his neck. It had been years since Talloi had actually been inside a building. He had burned them down, had run through them, had ransacked them, cleared them of all life, but to be in one, quietly waiting, waking up, resting, with nothing to do other than breathe and wait—was new. He couldn’t even remember sleeping on a bed, the feeling of it, of actually waking up without rocks under his spine, or aching joints, or without the smell of the dirt in his nose. Closing his eyes tighter, he tried to act as though he was still asleep in order to stay there a little while longer. The warmth there was something that he remembered, something that had stayed with him for so long, elicited there from the heat and the smell of paper, the feeling of being enclosed, of being protected, of being hidden. He could hear nothing at all; there was no sound. His breathing. The big man’s breathing too, but that was all. Resting for a moment in years of movement, rest still recognizable but still so small he could barely breath onto it, he could barely hold it in his mind—he did not want to lose this memory too, as well as everything else. The bed, the sheets. The first time in years—these things had existed without him.
“Hatchet Man. Wake up. We have work to do.”
Talloi pushed his legs out of the bed with his feet just barely touching the floor.
“Yes sir. I’m ready.”
The big man stood, a form dark and shapeless, while still imposing fear on the boy, his face and body blotted out by the lamp that shone behind him. He told Talloi to wake up Little Rebel and The Priest—they were going into a town to meet with a certain man.
“Tell them to be ready for a fight. This man will not want to see us.”
The three boys rode in the back of a pick truck sitting on top of their weapons—all of them carrying only their machetes. The big man was the only one in the cab, driving as often as possible with the lights off. He had told them in his deep whisper voice, that they were going to have to be as quiet as possible. “You are little shadows,” he told them.
“We must go into this man’s home and take him from his bed. We will take him outside and to a small cellar and there we will get him to talk to us.”
The three rode in the truck in silence, listening to the wind as it rushed over their heads, looking now and then ahead of the car, behind, into the thick trees—Talloi was the only one who ever raised his head to the sky. He had known what he would see, but he looked anyways. A black stretch, a dome, a lid on the world, completely void of any star or moon. A thickness surrounded them.
“Priest,” he hissed through the wind, “What day is it?”
The boy looked at him with a crazed expression. The question was repeated.
“What are you asking me?”
“The day, do you think that it is the weekend yet?”
Little Rebel moved between them slowly, so that the big man would not be able to see him.
“I hope it is the weekend.”
The Priest did not agree. His eyes flashed in the darkness and his teeth moved up and down as he spoke, “Maybe it is a Monday. It feels like a Monday to me.”
Talloi faced the sky again and asked without looking at either of them.
“And what time of year is it?”
Neither of the boys answered.
“I cannot remember the last time I noticed a season, or when it even rained.”
The Priest pushed him with his right hand, hissing again. “It doesn’t matter. Shut up with this talk. Men do not worry about the seasons or about days. We make them for ourselves.”
There was silence for a while. The trees seeming to come closer and then push further away like a large strange capillary. The truck moved quickly through the small tunnel, traveling in a senseless void, deprived of direction and sensation. It was just the noise of the wind and the feeling of the truck beneath them; even the road was faceless—with few characteristics to point out. Not straight or winding, not smooth or bumpy, the car did not seem to go up any rises or go down into any slumps. They were being carried into an unknown region, as though not being moved at all. It was as though everything was coming to them. Then as the trees began to come closer, suddenly breaking away into a large black expanse, Little Rebel began to giggle.
“I really think it’s Sunday. Don’t you Talloi?”
And the reply coming from nowhere, outside of everything. “Yes, of course it is. Today is Sunday and we are going to church.”
With this strange image between them there was nothing to say. The expanse was there all around them. They were not moving at all. They had left the camp. They had traveled toward something far off, and had ended up here. The wind, the bodies, the loose understanding of words. Talloi had never been to church that he could remember. But he knew enough about them—people went there to pray and to have their prayers answered. He thought about this for a moment, and then about the things he wanted, the bed and the sheets and the smell of paper flooded back to him. The rose and the pool and the tern, the dream of the strange, cold house and the words coming back too like an impossible skin completely denied yet not crippled, not unable to assume its original position. Who was it that was speaking in his mind? He wondered. Was it his grandmother, or someone else? People pray to get what they want. But they pray in church; that is where prayer is accepted, not in a truck. He thought about this too and grew silent, thinking only on the dream and what he saw there.
The darkness was taken apart first by the lights far away, electric lights dotting the windows, dotting the sky around them. They appeared suddenly, from the nothing. Coming closer and closer as the constructions of the city multiplied into the hard facts of walls and alleys and road under the tires of the truck. The boys kept their machetes low, staring open-mouthed at all of the buildings, listening to the music coming from windows, or the smells of cooking, or the noises of conversations being held behind closed doors. They looked with terrified eyes at flowers that rested by some doorways, or at the vision of women awake before the day had begun walking down the streets with laundry on their heads, or pails for water. The city was a different place entirely. All of them had come from one, only to return as alien travelers, dark portents, with darker desires and designs. A pall of shame and curiosity surrounded them, and once slowing to turn a corner, Little Rebel waved at an older woman, an ancient one, who then smiled and raised her hand to return the greeting.
Moving down roads and alleys confused the boys. They had become lost; to remember the way out of the maze was impossible. So they continued to stare, continued to think of questions to ask, only to have them be replaced, quickly, by another. And then finally, abruptly, the car stopped, the big man got out and told them to do the same. They were going to have to walk to the house. As they descended from the bay of the truck Talloi noticed that they were surrounded by homes with high walls, all of the houses dark and quiet. Footsteps reflected against the walls and came back to them, their machetes dark and low; their bodies lined up one after the other, with the big man, Talloi, Priest, and Little Rebel, from tallest to shortest, casting shadows on the sidewalks thrown by the yellow light of the street lamps. The big man moved through a hole in a chain-link fence and the others followed into a dark garden rancid with the smell of flowers. The boys crouched low and listened as everything was explained.
Talloi could not help but be lost in thought, to smell flowers again, the act of it pushed him away from everything. He could feel his stomach begin to sour. The feeling had happened only once before during his first kill, and after that it was never there. But it was unmistakable. He was sick, like a little boy, like a twelve-year-old boy. Worried about the faces, about what was to happen inside the house. The cold feeling that he had known, that he had fashioned for himself, was gone. Suddenly. Vanished. When the line filed off through a thick hedge, he stayed behind on his knees and vomited all over the ground before him without making any noise.
Once he was done he approached the house, already able to hear the shouts and cries before he had reached the back door—still opened. He could hear the cries of people about to die, that were dying, and he realized that he was lied to. No one was going to speak to this man. he was going to be murdered. And the small, shrill voices told him of the faceless children also killed. And the thick wail of the wife laid down in the dark. And the robust shouting told him of the fight taking place as the dishes and the cabinets fell to the ground—above all the shrill laughter spilling from The Priest’s mouth like a burst pipe. A noise came closer and closer, exploding through the house, invisible from the outside; someone was running through the house to escape, coming straight for the back door of the place. Blankness filled Talloi’s head, waiting, waiting, as the noise grew and grew and grew. Becoming so large that he was afraid to wait for it, even him, the Hatchet Man, showing fear like a child. As it coalesced, the sound becoming deafening, he hefted his machete, gripping it in both hands, setting his feet underneath him. Determined to knock the head right from the shoulders—whatever it was that was coming. And in a blink, he saw it, instantly knowing what it was: Little Rebel, holding out his arms, both hands missing, streaming past him and into the dark. Only a trail of blood to say that he past, and the ringing of the little boy’s voice in his ears. The house was dark, pitch black inside.
Before he knew it Talloi was streaking after Little Rebel, screaming his name at the top of his lungs, his real name, “Bia! Bia! Let me help you!” As he ran, houses lit up. The bright squares of windows suddenly appearing around him, blazing new light onto the street and into the back yards. He ran without looking at anything. Climbing the fences, scrambling through the alleys and the driveways, constantly looking for blood or for the young boy lying somewhere already dead. But he found nothing. Soon the neighborhood was awake, the dawn already growing from nothing to paper thin, to the birth of gold in the east. Men were outside yelling at one another.
“Who has been shouting?” One of them asked.
The others replied that they did not know.
“Someone has been hurt. Bashire’s house is on fire!”
The others shouted together, all of them moving down the street toward the dead man’s house. A few of them had weapons with them, others held flashlights in front of them like swords.
Talloi had stopped in a backyard to catch his breath. He was weeping, dry heaving against a fence. Cold. Terrified. What happened inside the house? He wondered. Did the man fight back? Did he know that they were coming? Why would this happen? We were friends. Brothers. More shouting from all around them. More shouting like one big mouth rising up with the dawn made of a hundred voices.
They had found a man leaving the house—it was big man, hurt in the leg, limping toward the truck. The neighbors began to beat him into the stone. Talloi had not traveled far. His mind was blank. He tried to think of his only memory, but it was gone. Then, he tried to remember his dream, but it was also impossible to find. Everything had been traveled, all roads leading to this one place, to this small place filled with tears and stomach fluid, filled too with the brutal sounds of revenge, and again the sounds of fire. Dissolved again, differently from the last village, piece by piece, moment by moment. All of the images of every night taken away. Then the grief, the sinister laughter of children sent to conquer, the stupors of the wine, the uncontrollable violence in his heart nurtured for years. Each piece alone, taken away, disappearing. Bit by bit. And grain by grain. He wanted to go back into time. To stop everything to stop the day that he was taken away. To stop everything. To die. To die. To die.
“What are you hiding from, you little coward faggot?”
Covered in blood, The Priest stood above him. With a machete hovering over Talloi’s neck.
“You are one of us, Talloi. That cannot change. God has put us together.”
Talloi looked up with his eyes still streaming with tears, to notice two small hands around The Priest’s neck tied there with a shoelace. But he could do nothing but cry. Cowering, shivering in the cold as the sun rose. Rose again as it always did, to mark the unheeded passage of days. One after the other. Talloi was lost completely.
There was a noise in the house next to them, lights coming on one by one, following the lines of a hallway inside. But The Priest did not notice; he was too busy watching his brother cower before him. He touched the hands fondly, while letting out a small laugh—a squeak of a laugh.
“These are an accident you know. I liked the Little Rebel, but I thought that he was the man’s daughter. He was always a little girl. I took his hands before I knew. And he ran away screaming and crying. He was never a man like me.”
Behind the two of them a door opened to reveal a young woman holding onto a shotgun, holding it by her waist, her eyes frightened, opened wide. She tried to speak but faltered and then continued with a voice louder than she had planned.
“Are you the one who burnt down Bashire’s house?”
The Priest turned to face her, slowly, and smiled. Nodding his head.
The woman raised her head to scream to the other neighbors, to tell them that she had found the one who did it. But The Priest was already running toward her, his face bright, his mouth opened into a jagged shape. It was already too late. He had moved three feet; his hands high in the air, the blade moving through it like a long kept promise, like a bit of fate. The gun had already gone off before he had come close enough. The blast ringing out, throwing him back to where he had started, further still; knocking the hands off of his head to be stuck in a tree limb; knocking the blade out of his hands to lie lifeless and simple on the ground; knocking him onto his back to stare at the full, judgmental face of the sun peeling away the darkness of night. And ears rang with the percussion of the gun. And Talloi’s body became weightless from fright until the woman shook him by his shoulders to rouse him.
“Boy, are you alright? Are you hurt?”
He opened his eyes, closed them. Opened them again to see her in front of him—a concerned expression on her face, one that cared for him, that knew him, that believed in him as a being, that he was real, and not lost. Deep in his mind he saw the rose again, that it was dawn that last time, that the rose was held up to the sun. As she questioned him he tried desperately to pull the words from his bowels. The words that he had been waiting to ask, and finally he was able to say, “Are you my mother? You are my mother, aren’t you?”
“No, I am not your mother. But you are safe.”
She rocked him in her arms, rubbing his back with her left hand.
He asked her again, telling her, “You are my mother. I know it. You are my mother. I have been looking for you.”
Her voice came back unchanged, “No, I am not your mother. I do not know you at all. But you are safe.”
The sun higher in the sky, flooding the world with light. Covering all of them. The burned house still smoldering, the body of the big man pummeled into dust, the body of The Priest opened and void, the body of Bia handless and lost forever. The two people, the woman and the boy, resting in the garden with the warm light surrounding. Talloi asked the woman again and again, but she refused. Telling him each time that he was safe. While he remembered the rose differently now—it was the same as the sun, twisted into a knot of fire, the two of them the same, as one. There was no difference.
//ww
His body was dissolved. Invisible. As though he had descended some large stair, had gone further and further into a world of nothing. A world of not world, without property, without any senses, with a spirit unaware of its boundaries. This had happened years ago. It was happening now. How far away everything seemed, how compact the future, how close the past. How long had it been sitting like this? Sitting in the dark awaiting a hut or two huts or all of them, all at once, one just after the other, in a strange obscure series, to blaze up, like normal, just as he was told. All of the boys around him, two feet, three feet, spread out for miles, he didn’t know, of course not, not like this, but they were there—waiting like him. Smelling the smell of spring, so far removed and completely lost, now generally described as wet and nothing else—not even sweet. Pulling it into their lungs and pushing it out as an intruder. These young boys, as lost as dumb dogs, waiting for the huts to light on fire, waiting for the screams, the rush of wind running toward the light, further and further (not out of his anti-world, not into something new, but towards the blank faces and the white eyes of those he was sent for).
His one memory, pulled out of the bloodied ether, somehow still there, kept safe in quiet part of his brain, kept alive through repetition, through constant visitation, was of his childhood. A simple scene of his grandmother’s house in Freetown: a rose garden, a pool constantly being filled with water, a tern about to land on the roof, the sound of a family member’s voice. Since the fighting began, this memory, the very thought of some other place had changed: at first it kept him safe, it allowed him to remember what he was, where he was from, that there was a another world someplace. But now it was only a reminder that he had nothing. It had become, through years of sleepless nights, brutal mornings, the cries and sobs of dying people, it had become something that pushed him forward—it made the war easy. Revolving in his mind, he thought of each piece, and looked toward the percussion of bullets and sat still, anticipating what was to come. And with each piece of his memory, what was there, Talloi became less and less, he became more and more terrifying, brutal. They took this from you, he told himself. It is their fault, no one can ever doubt it, that you are like this. One hand resting on his machete, the other mindlessly playing in the dirt. A breath was drawn from somewhere, coming out of all of the boys around him.
They were closer than he thought. And a flame rose from the ground and jumped up into the sky spreading out and defining the true extent of the darkness. Bodies exploded from the light and the boys, all of them, were up and running as one large body, with one mind and one purpose, screaming, smiling, their eyes and teeth reflecting the golden light, moist and coming quicker and quicker. Flooding from the night like locusts, small boys, no older than ten years old, frail and weak, suddenly animated into a demonic presence. As they advanced, more huts went up in flames, and their shadows, like dancing men, were thrown out into the surrounding land, long, grotesque, unfaltering.
It was then that night became night—finally something other than just blackness, again, the dimensions defined, the sound spreading out like dye in water, screams filling up all of space, and eternity, filing back into the past, running ahead into the future, staining the land itself. Hut after hut went up in flames, the inhabitants scratching through the dust in the posture of cockroaches, scurrying on all fours with terror in their throats. Looking up into the sky to find nothing, to maybe find a neighbor or friend dying. To catch the scent of flesh on fire. To see, in the strange bewildering motion of recognition, a child spattered with blood shooting a man in the head and running off to find another victim. And, like always, just outside the light, riding that impenetrable line between darkness and light, the older men with the stern faces of fathers that had set everything into motion. They had formed a barrier that would not allow any villagers through. The din of murder continued as women were raped in the still-hot ashes of their homes, the girls murdered, the children murdered, the dogs, the goats, everything. Talloi only thought of the roses slowly being covered with soot, the pool filling with blood, the bird screaming out that he was a king, a king, a king. The motions easy, a mix of ecstasy and horror, as he slowly wandered between the flames and found those not yet dead. A young girl, her clothes entirely red, her arms outstretched and her fingers splayed into the dirt. White eyes staring up and into the void of the sky, grasping. He knelt next to her head and touched her hair.
“Hello.”
She stared upward, but did not respond. In her eyes there was something that he had seen before, but had never been able to name. A smile spread across his lips.
“Do you know what they call me?”
Flames licking the sky, the ring of dancing shadows leaping and lunging all around them. The girl coughed with blood splattering and beading up in the dust.
“I was named Talloi. But then they started to call me Hatchet Man.”
The smile wider. The blade, already red, seemed to melt in the gold light. So close, the heat bearing down on them, their ears filling with the sound of it, as though surrounded by millions of mouths gnashing and feeding.
“It is because I don’t like guns. The noise makes me nervous.”
She writhed on the ground so as to flee, her mouth opening to throw her voice uselessly into the smoke. It was as though the blade didn’t move at all. As though everything was already decided.
And in the east, despite everything, despite absolutely everything, there was a pale glow, and again, the sun began to rise. Without consideration for the dead. Without asking the living. The laughter finally ending. The children again sitting in the dust, again awaiting the ridiculous waste of lives as the sun would soon stretch out and uncover the world for what it was before and what it was after.
One of the younger boys was crying. The group had been hiking through the jungle for the better part of the morning. All of them were hungry and tired, loose as a pile of thread. They had crossed a river by balancing on a log. It was a short distance but the youngest boy had lost his balance and had fallen with his legs apart, landing with the tree between them. The pain was excruciating, but the shame was worse. The older boys laughed at him, saying things like, “The baby has smashed his little jewels,” or “Now you don’t have to worry about making the girls pregnant, you’ve broken them for good.” The older men ignored everything, hoisting their large guns onto their shoulders and disappearing into the trees. While the boys followed and continued to jeer over their shoulders, Talloi fell back and put his hand on the young boy’s shoulder.
“You shouldn’t cry Little Rebel. There is no need. Men don’t cry.”
Little Rebel stopped for a moment, and opened his locked fingers to peer through a small crack at Talloi’s face.
“But I am not a man. I’m younger than you.”
“If you fight with us, with any one of us. You are a man. Only a man can kill like you do. You should know that.”
At this he stopped crying and the two of them moved side by side, holding their machetes out, sometimes moving them through the air to widen the deep path that they walked. Trees stretched over their heads to block out the sky with millions of leaves, each a different color of green, shaking in the wind, shattering the sun light into smaller and smaller pieces so that it didn’t fall on them directly. The group moved on, one after the other, as though being pulled or as though pushing, through the heat, through the deep trough, the maze of the jungle; they marched dumbly forward with expressionless faces and the spattering of blood hard on their clothes. Lifting and letting fall their earthen feet, their clumsy drenched and aching soles barely marking the dirt as they moved further into the jungle and toward camp. Weapons and ammunition strung across their thin frames, rattling at each foot fall, occasionally catching light and holding it there for a second, or less. Each of them existed as a small ill-formed composite—they had fashioned themselves into warriors as best they could. Some of them with boots, most barefoot, others wearing sandals. A bare back here and there in the slow line. One boy, toward the head of the line walking with his chest out, his red shirt proudly displaying the body of Mickey Mouse. Some heads bare, others with ball caps or bandanas or green pith helmets from wars unknown. Another boy holding a string of severed hands—his usual trophy. Another still covered by a blanket stolen from the town.
The procession continued through the trees for so long that no one thought of anything other than the simplest command of movement, to move forward, to not stop. Voiceless again, as voiceless as they were the night before, as dumb, as blind. Even in the sunlight they moved with open mouths and sweat wetting the dried blood, both dripping off of their noses and falling onto the plants that surrounded them. Finally, their backs stooped and their heads tied to their bodies with fraying string, the men told them to stop and rest for a moment. Whether the boys heard them or not didn’t matter, seeing one of them stopped, going against the limitless command of movement, made them too drop their loads one by one. All of the items of their small and bloody war falling with distinct noises, distinct silences, and the boys fell too, in one great motion as one single creature pulled from the depths. Talloi and the young boy sat together sharing a canteen of water, and stared dumbly together at the ground between them, while the other boys shared cigarettes and tried to talk like warriors. Occasionally one would say something daring, something to solidify their present blood-painted bodies, “I have never had a family, but you. My brother killers.” Or there would be a child who would refute, directly, his entire life up until that point. “I was never alive until I was taken into this war. In this is my beginning.” Still, a boy nicknamed, “The Priest”, with his trophy of hands, stood up in front of all of the reclining figures, the severed hands around his neck, laying on his shallow, shirtless chest, standing before them so as to address them all. “The whole earth,” he said, “is our slaughter house. God, the rich man, has given it to us.” The boys cheered while he continued, “If we do good, he will not leave us; he will save us.”
His words always seemed to bolster the group, to pull back into their faces, some strange warmth that made them seem all the more human. Talloi and Little Rebel watched blankly, staring with flies on their skin, while The Priest finished his small speech by putting his cigarette out on the hand dangling over his left breast. Talloi looked around the group and at the older men further off, always apart from them. He tried to remember what was said to him before all of this had become his life. Of course, he had had a family, his grandmother in Freetown at least. But no matter what, he could not remember what had happened to his mother and father, if they had ever existed. Even without being able to remember them, he was sure that there was a life outside of the killing and the long nights and the mindless walks from blood to blood, from waking to sleeping, but that didn’t really matter. If he couldn’t remember it maybe it wasn’t real. He could convince himself of that; it was easy enough to believe that only rifles and gun smoke and dying people’s last breaths were the only things that were real. But the roses, and the pool, and the tern all disagreed. He looked at the young boy, around his age when he first became part of the group, his downward eyes, the round shaved head, the smile that knew of two things hiding both well enough: happiness and fear.
“Do you remember your family, Little Rebel?”
The boy did not move his head for a long time. Talloi asked the question again, in a softer tone, quietly, so that the others were sure not to hear. And the boy’s voice came out like a thin drop of water.
“Yes. I can remember everything.”
“Your mother and father?”
He looked up at Talloi with his eyes wide and pleading, his face bright for the filth that covered it, he moved closer and talked in a whisper.
“Both of them.”
Talloi waited for the boy to continue but realized he would only speak if asked directly. All of the boys were afraid to speak of the past. It was a betrayal.
“Where they nice people, your family?”
“They laughed every morning. And we had a bath and food and I would have to change my clothes every day.”
“You can remember all of that, even in your small head?” asked Talloi, to which Little Rebel nodded his head quickly.
“Can you remember anything then?”
The other boys were playing with the severed hands, acting as though they wanted to make love to one of the boys who was sleeping, one hand on the boy’s crotch, the other on his cheek. They howled with laughter. Talloi watched them and mindlessly said, “No. I can say nothing of my home, my words are not enough.”
At this the boy asked, “You don’t remember your mother or father?”
“No. I’ve never known them.” Talloi cleared his throat and spat over his right shoulder watching as the white ball moved through the air and fell to the ground. “Let this go. Speaking like this only makes us weak. Go talk to the big man and ask for some palm wine to make us strong for the walk back to camp.”
He tried to think back, to remember more of his family, they had to be there, someone, somehow. He had to be born. He couldn’t have been the one person in all of time to exist quickly, without direction, without a future and a past. It was impossible. He had his grandmother’s back yard, the pool, the rose, the tern; maybe that is enough, he thought. Maybe I don’t need anything more than that. When he looked up from the ground and saw Little Rebel running back to him with the canteen of wine held above his head, he told himself that he was wrong. There are other things too, he told himself. There are other things too. He had realized, without being able to put it into words, that life is not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after. But that life was lived as a long line of events, from the beginning to the end.
A clearing in the trees. A large expanse of mud and shambled mud brick buildings with no windows. A series of posts like huge lances leaning into the ground held up an enormous network of camouflage netting that threw shade onto the ground. Behind the buildings were the trucks—some working, some in shambles; axle rods clotted with dirt obliquely grew from the refuse of their trash heap. The men had gone inside to clean their weapons and sleep, the radio playing softly from inside while a few of the boys drank more and more of the wine, falling deeper and deeper into drunken states that pushed some of them to their knees babbling like fools, and others still running into the sun and chasing each other like animals. Talloi stumbled toward the river, vomiting along the way, holding his head from the sun and the crushing feel of the wine. A cigarette in his hand smoldered unnoticed, the ash suspended like a bar of lead. He got up, leaning, and scrambled forward, falling, he moved up again. Further toward the brown river that sluiced its way through the country and toward the sea, moving with it all of time. He wheeled on the sun holding his hand up in salute:
“I do not believe in God. The river is the God. You could say… I do not believe. I do not. The nights are terrible,” spitting into the water, “kids, we are kids... The nights are dark. They are dark. You...YOU… I do not believe in god, not any more. Could you say something else? The boys are dead. We were dead. No. Yes… but we are living. I can’t understand it.” A sound pulled him from his conversation, and he looked across the river. “There is nothing over there. Just me, just me and you. And all of them asleep. Fuck you. Fuck you. Do you understand what I am saying? I’m a big man. I have a new name. Hatchet Man. Because I am good with a blade. The… a blade. In a year I may have to shave to my face. But today.” A sound from the camp, a curdled shout from Priest turned him around so quickly that he fell onto his back—flailing his legs in order to sit up and see what was happening.
“Mother fuckers! You cannot tell me that his parents are good. They are bad people! Why is he fighting if they are good? Stupid faggot, lying faggot. I’ll kill him tonight for that, no one ever lies to me.” Talloi cleared his throat and spat into the river again, this time pausing for a moment, doubled over, ready to vomit for the second time. Eventually he continued, “I have the ocean. Freetown was the ocean. Yes. That is right… It was on the water. There are boats. It is larger and longer and better than this river! Forever. Forever… Any direction. Here it’s just down down down...” Another noise from camp disturbed him. “Mother fuck!” he shouted, “Fuck. Fuck FUCK… Look at them. Priest is an idiot. He is dumb you know. God is not. He isn’t… There never was anything like that. Bullets. The river maybe. Maybe something else—like the ocean,” helplessly shrugging his shoulders, “or Freetown.”
Talloi stumbled again, this time falling into the water, up to his waist, thrashing about in it with the palms of his hands, then with his fists. His face turning grey, his eyes yellow and opaque to the light. Raising both of his hands, Talloi opened his mouth to say something, a last thing, a final piece to everything, swaying wildly. Control, if ever possessed, now completely gone. He struggled like this, to find the words to say, his blind tongue moving in his mouth searching there for something precious, until he finally became too weak, too tired, too small of a thing and fell over. Half in and half out of the river, completely drenched by the dirty water. Talloi fell asleep for the first time in two days.
At first there was nothing other than the pool in front of him. He was barefoot, the cool concrete underneath his feet. The pool again leaking constantly into the ground, and more quickly being refilled from a garden hose suspended over the side and dangling like a snake facing downward. He was there. The ocean only a few miles away, the high walls of the garden surrounding him. The terns in the sky with their bright eyes and their good vision, circling him, coming closer and further away. He could hear nothing except the hose. It was the sound of fire eating through a whole countryside. Then again it would change to nothing, and then to voices that he could not place. That he could not remember. That were nothing at all. He stepped forward, toward the pool, and set his feet against the edge looking down into its depths. Talloi jumped backwards and landed on his backside, trying to scoot away from the edge on all fours, but it was impossible. He was standing against the edge. Looking over and into the pool where there were bodies piled on top of bodies underneath the water. The hose was still pouring water, and the pool was still leaking. The bodies faceless without hands or feet. He looked up to see the tern above him. But saw only sky.
“Talloi Engura, do as I have told you!”
The old woman was mad, walking forward into the living room constantly. She would come from the kitchen, with a cup of tea in her hands, reach him, say the words, disappear to the kitchen. It happened back and forth, again and again. Talloi, this time sitting down at a table with his school work in front of him. Arithmetic. He hated his teacher and refused to learn.
“I am not your teacher,” she told him, “you can not tell me no.”
Speaking was impossible, Talloi realized this quickly—he wanted to tell his grandmother to stop coming and going like she did, he wanted her to stay, to tell her that he wanted her to stay, but it was impossible. He opened his mouth and then nothing happened.
“You know,” she confided, “you do not know the pain you have caused. You left as a traveler, not escaping into any future, you are not the same boy that I left at the station.”
A high loud crack traveled between them. He looked and saw only white. A distance there. Forever outwards. The sound of the ocean, and boats back and forth, sounding their horns. A red light. Two red lights. A weightless feeling like an empty stomach. A terrible pain across his face. And he receded into the black and saw the harbor teeming with life so far away. A voice unknown, entirely unknown, a woman’s maybe, telling him to pray for the ships so that the dark throat would no reject them. And he knelt in that nothing and he tried, but nothing happened. He could not. It wouldn’t work.
Inside the house, a new house, a cold house, there was a feeling he could not place. He was lost there, or something else was lost there. And he thought, suddenly, curiously, without passion, of the motions used to sharpen a blade, remembered above all else.
“You can not tell me no.”
The voice grew louder and louder and louder, until he clutched his head and cried out for it to stop.
The big man was asking him a question, but his voice was so far away that it didn’t make any sense at all. Talloi could feel his cold feet, wet and distant, stretched out. The pants clinging to his skin. His sore feet. The aching joints. The miserable feeling of a stomach long ago turned into a hovel already burning inside him. And he knew, without having to think very hard, that it was night outside and that it was dark like every other night, that the stars were hidden from view, ashamed. He knew that he was drunk, that he had fallen into the river. That time had passed, that it was always passing. That he could not go back in time and stop the palm wine from going down his throat like it was an endless cavern, impossible to navigate or fill. He knew that beyond all of it, inside all of it, him and the other boys, all the boys, inside the weapons and the crazed pastime of blood, something was wrong. The idea terrified him, it had come out of nowhere, impossible to expect, to prepare himself for it, to fortify against it. And quickly, without any fight, it had arrived, it had convinced him. His head split with pain. His eyes untrustworthy and filled with doubt, yellowed beyond eyes, smooth and glassless as stones were sealed shut. The lids refused to be lifted and refused to look ahead as the big man picked him up from the ground and carried him back to the quiet camp.
When he finally opened his eyes he saw that he was inside the big man’s room—the large clumsy bricks, the dark pale scent of gun oil and paper all around him. Talloi was on the bed with the covers thrown over his body, wrapping him loosely, but with a weight that pressed in on his body below his neck. It had been years since Talloi had actually been inside a building. He had burned them down, had run through them, had ransacked them, cleared them of all life, but to be in one, quietly waiting, waking up, resting, with nothing to do other than breathe and wait—was new. He couldn’t even remember sleeping on a bed, the feeling of it, of actually waking up without rocks under his spine, or aching joints, or without the smell of the dirt in his nose. Closing his eyes tighter, he tried to act as though he was still asleep in order to stay there a little while longer. The warmth there was something that he remembered, something that had stayed with him for so long, elicited there from the heat and the smell of paper, the feeling of being enclosed, of being protected, of being hidden. He could hear nothing at all; there was no sound. His breathing. The big man’s breathing too, but that was all. Resting for a moment in years of movement, rest still recognizable but still so small he could barely breath onto it, he could barely hold it in his mind—he did not want to lose this memory too, as well as everything else. The bed, the sheets. The first time in years—these things had existed without him.
“Hatchet Man. Wake up. We have work to do.”
Talloi pushed his legs out of the bed with his feet just barely touching the floor.
“Yes sir. I’m ready.”
The big man stood, a form dark and shapeless, while still imposing fear on the boy, his face and body blotted out by the lamp that shone behind him. He told Talloi to wake up Little Rebel and The Priest—they were going into a town to meet with a certain man.
“Tell them to be ready for a fight. This man will not want to see us.”
The three boys rode in the back of a pick truck sitting on top of their weapons—all of them carrying only their machetes. The big man was the only one in the cab, driving as often as possible with the lights off. He had told them in his deep whisper voice, that they were going to have to be as quiet as possible. “You are little shadows,” he told them.
“We must go into this man’s home and take him from his bed. We will take him outside and to a small cellar and there we will get him to talk to us.”
The three rode in the truck in silence, listening to the wind as it rushed over their heads, looking now and then ahead of the car, behind, into the thick trees—Talloi was the only one who ever raised his head to the sky. He had known what he would see, but he looked anyways. A black stretch, a dome, a lid on the world, completely void of any star or moon. A thickness surrounded them.
“Priest,” he hissed through the wind, “What day is it?”
The boy looked at him with a crazed expression. The question was repeated.
“What are you asking me?”
“The day, do you think that it is the weekend yet?”
Little Rebel moved between them slowly, so that the big man would not be able to see him.
“I hope it is the weekend.”
The Priest did not agree. His eyes flashed in the darkness and his teeth moved up and down as he spoke, “Maybe it is a Monday. It feels like a Monday to me.”
Talloi faced the sky again and asked without looking at either of them.
“And what time of year is it?”
Neither of the boys answered.
“I cannot remember the last time I noticed a season, or when it even rained.”
The Priest pushed him with his right hand, hissing again. “It doesn’t matter. Shut up with this talk. Men do not worry about the seasons or about days. We make them for ourselves.”
There was silence for a while. The trees seeming to come closer and then push further away like a large strange capillary. The truck moved quickly through the small tunnel, traveling in a senseless void, deprived of direction and sensation. It was just the noise of the wind and the feeling of the truck beneath them; even the road was faceless—with few characteristics to point out. Not straight or winding, not smooth or bumpy, the car did not seem to go up any rises or go down into any slumps. They were being carried into an unknown region, as though not being moved at all. It was as though everything was coming to them. Then as the trees began to come closer, suddenly breaking away into a large black expanse, Little Rebel began to giggle.
“I really think it’s Sunday. Don’t you Talloi?”
And the reply coming from nowhere, outside of everything. “Yes, of course it is. Today is Sunday and we are going to church.”
With this strange image between them there was nothing to say. The expanse was there all around them. They were not moving at all. They had left the camp. They had traveled toward something far off, and had ended up here. The wind, the bodies, the loose understanding of words. Talloi had never been to church that he could remember. But he knew enough about them—people went there to pray and to have their prayers answered. He thought about this for a moment, and then about the things he wanted, the bed and the sheets and the smell of paper flooded back to him. The rose and the pool and the tern, the dream of the strange, cold house and the words coming back too like an impossible skin completely denied yet not crippled, not unable to assume its original position. Who was it that was speaking in his mind? He wondered. Was it his grandmother, or someone else? People pray to get what they want. But they pray in church; that is where prayer is accepted, not in a truck. He thought about this too and grew silent, thinking only on the dream and what he saw there.
The darkness was taken apart first by the lights far away, electric lights dotting the windows, dotting the sky around them. They appeared suddenly, from the nothing. Coming closer and closer as the constructions of the city multiplied into the hard facts of walls and alleys and road under the tires of the truck. The boys kept their machetes low, staring open-mouthed at all of the buildings, listening to the music coming from windows, or the smells of cooking, or the noises of conversations being held behind closed doors. They looked with terrified eyes at flowers that rested by some doorways, or at the vision of women awake before the day had begun walking down the streets with laundry on their heads, or pails for water. The city was a different place entirely. All of them had come from one, only to return as alien travelers, dark portents, with darker desires and designs. A pall of shame and curiosity surrounded them, and once slowing to turn a corner, Little Rebel waved at an older woman, an ancient one, who then smiled and raised her hand to return the greeting.
Moving down roads and alleys confused the boys. They had become lost; to remember the way out of the maze was impossible. So they continued to stare, continued to think of questions to ask, only to have them be replaced, quickly, by another. And then finally, abruptly, the car stopped, the big man got out and told them to do the same. They were going to have to walk to the house. As they descended from the bay of the truck Talloi noticed that they were surrounded by homes with high walls, all of the houses dark and quiet. Footsteps reflected against the walls and came back to them, their machetes dark and low; their bodies lined up one after the other, with the big man, Talloi, Priest, and Little Rebel, from tallest to shortest, casting shadows on the sidewalks thrown by the yellow light of the street lamps. The big man moved through a hole in a chain-link fence and the others followed into a dark garden rancid with the smell of flowers. The boys crouched low and listened as everything was explained.
Talloi could not help but be lost in thought, to smell flowers again, the act of it pushed him away from everything. He could feel his stomach begin to sour. The feeling had happened only once before during his first kill, and after that it was never there. But it was unmistakable. He was sick, like a little boy, like a twelve-year-old boy. Worried about the faces, about what was to happen inside the house. The cold feeling that he had known, that he had fashioned for himself, was gone. Suddenly. Vanished. When the line filed off through a thick hedge, he stayed behind on his knees and vomited all over the ground before him without making any noise.
Once he was done he approached the house, already able to hear the shouts and cries before he had reached the back door—still opened. He could hear the cries of people about to die, that were dying, and he realized that he was lied to. No one was going to speak to this man. he was going to be murdered. And the small, shrill voices told him of the faceless children also killed. And the thick wail of the wife laid down in the dark. And the robust shouting told him of the fight taking place as the dishes and the cabinets fell to the ground—above all the shrill laughter spilling from The Priest’s mouth like a burst pipe. A noise came closer and closer, exploding through the house, invisible from the outside; someone was running through the house to escape, coming straight for the back door of the place. Blankness filled Talloi’s head, waiting, waiting, as the noise grew and grew and grew. Becoming so large that he was afraid to wait for it, even him, the Hatchet Man, showing fear like a child. As it coalesced, the sound becoming deafening, he hefted his machete, gripping it in both hands, setting his feet underneath him. Determined to knock the head right from the shoulders—whatever it was that was coming. And in a blink, he saw it, instantly knowing what it was: Little Rebel, holding out his arms, both hands missing, streaming past him and into the dark. Only a trail of blood to say that he past, and the ringing of the little boy’s voice in his ears. The house was dark, pitch black inside.
Before he knew it Talloi was streaking after Little Rebel, screaming his name at the top of his lungs, his real name, “Bia! Bia! Let me help you!” As he ran, houses lit up. The bright squares of windows suddenly appearing around him, blazing new light onto the street and into the back yards. He ran without looking at anything. Climbing the fences, scrambling through the alleys and the driveways, constantly looking for blood or for the young boy lying somewhere already dead. But he found nothing. Soon the neighborhood was awake, the dawn already growing from nothing to paper thin, to the birth of gold in the east. Men were outside yelling at one another.
“Who has been shouting?” One of them asked.
The others replied that they did not know.
“Someone has been hurt. Bashire’s house is on fire!”
The others shouted together, all of them moving down the street toward the dead man’s house. A few of them had weapons with them, others held flashlights in front of them like swords.
Talloi had stopped in a backyard to catch his breath. He was weeping, dry heaving against a fence. Cold. Terrified. What happened inside the house? He wondered. Did the man fight back? Did he know that they were coming? Why would this happen? We were friends. Brothers. More shouting from all around them. More shouting like one big mouth rising up with the dawn made of a hundred voices.
They had found a man leaving the house—it was big man, hurt in the leg, limping toward the truck. The neighbors began to beat him into the stone. Talloi had not traveled far. His mind was blank. He tried to think of his only memory, but it was gone. Then, he tried to remember his dream, but it was also impossible to find. Everything had been traveled, all roads leading to this one place, to this small place filled with tears and stomach fluid, filled too with the brutal sounds of revenge, and again the sounds of fire. Dissolved again, differently from the last village, piece by piece, moment by moment. All of the images of every night taken away. Then the grief, the sinister laughter of children sent to conquer, the stupors of the wine, the uncontrollable violence in his heart nurtured for years. Each piece alone, taken away, disappearing. Bit by bit. And grain by grain. He wanted to go back into time. To stop everything to stop the day that he was taken away. To stop everything. To die. To die. To die.
“What are you hiding from, you little coward faggot?”
Covered in blood, The Priest stood above him. With a machete hovering over Talloi’s neck.
“You are one of us, Talloi. That cannot change. God has put us together.”
Talloi looked up with his eyes still streaming with tears, to notice two small hands around The Priest’s neck tied there with a shoelace. But he could do nothing but cry. Cowering, shivering in the cold as the sun rose. Rose again as it always did, to mark the unheeded passage of days. One after the other. Talloi was lost completely.
There was a noise in the house next to them, lights coming on one by one, following the lines of a hallway inside. But The Priest did not notice; he was too busy watching his brother cower before him. He touched the hands fondly, while letting out a small laugh—a squeak of a laugh.
“These are an accident you know. I liked the Little Rebel, but I thought that he was the man’s daughter. He was always a little girl. I took his hands before I knew. And he ran away screaming and crying. He was never a man like me.”
Behind the two of them a door opened to reveal a young woman holding onto a shotgun, holding it by her waist, her eyes frightened, opened wide. She tried to speak but faltered and then continued with a voice louder than she had planned.
“Are you the one who burnt down Bashire’s house?”
The Priest turned to face her, slowly, and smiled. Nodding his head.
The woman raised her head to scream to the other neighbors, to tell them that she had found the one who did it. But The Priest was already running toward her, his face bright, his mouth opened into a jagged shape. It was already too late. He had moved three feet; his hands high in the air, the blade moving through it like a long kept promise, like a bit of fate. The gun had already gone off before he had come close enough. The blast ringing out, throwing him back to where he had started, further still; knocking the hands off of his head to be stuck in a tree limb; knocking the blade out of his hands to lie lifeless and simple on the ground; knocking him onto his back to stare at the full, judgmental face of the sun peeling away the darkness of night. And ears rang with the percussion of the gun. And Talloi’s body became weightless from fright until the woman shook him by his shoulders to rouse him.
“Boy, are you alright? Are you hurt?”
He opened his eyes, closed them. Opened them again to see her in front of him—a concerned expression on her face, one that cared for him, that knew him, that believed in him as a being, that he was real, and not lost. Deep in his mind he saw the rose again, that it was dawn that last time, that the rose was held up to the sun. As she questioned him he tried desperately to pull the words from his bowels. The words that he had been waiting to ask, and finally he was able to say, “Are you my mother? You are my mother, aren’t you?”
“No, I am not your mother. But you are safe.”
She rocked him in her arms, rubbing his back with her left hand.
He asked her again, telling her, “You are my mother. I know it. You are my mother. I have been looking for you.”
Her voice came back unchanged, “No, I am not your mother. I do not know you at all. But you are safe.”
The sun higher in the sky, flooding the world with light. Covering all of them. The burned house still smoldering, the body of the big man pummeled into dust, the body of The Priest opened and void, the body of Bia handless and lost forever. The two people, the woman and the boy, resting in the garden with the warm light surrounding. Talloi asked the woman again and again, but she refused. Telling him each time that he was safe. While he remembered the rose differently now—it was the same as the sun, twisted into a knot of fire, the two of them the same, as one. There was no difference.
//ww