Free Very Old Bones by William Kennedy Page B

substructure, some toad of the underground river, some snake of the primeval
slime, some cockroach from the cooling ooze of creation. I came up and looked out into the sky and saw it was fucking dawn or fucking twilight, what you will. Another fucking crepuscular moment,
let’s call it. And I said to myself, it’s going to be all fucking right in half an hour. But what was going to be all right?”
    “There’s a question on the floor,” Bosco said.
    “Exactly,” I said. “What is it?”
    “Crepuscularity,” he said.
    “Of course. So I surveyed the scene as best I could and saw that the Nazi I’d shot through the nose was still there in the distance. I had a perfect vision of how he’d fallen,
how his helmet went up on the right ear, how the blood coursed down his ex-nose into his mouth, et cetera. I listened for any telltale sign of that sly fucker with the goddamned dog biscuits and I
stayed put but made demarcative notations in my brain of what lay between that Nazi son of a bitch and myself, what approximate distance I had to traverse, for I had already decided, with a form of
self-defense made known to me by every cell in my body, that if I did not eat within several minutes I would die.
    “I have no stomach for death, especially my own, and so I calculated the hectares, the rods, and the metrical leftovers between the Nazi and me, and I slithered on my belly like a lizard
up from the putrid slush, the foul paste, the vomitous phlegm of a slop-jar swamp, and in time I reached my target, of whose freshness I was assured, unless I had been asleep for several days. I
took his helmet off, cut off his head and let it roll, sliced his clothing, ripped him up the middle and cut a split steak off his stomach, turned him over and cut two chops off his buttocks, stuck
him in the gizzard and ripped him sideways just so he’d remember me, slithered back to my cave with the steak and chops in his helmet, waited till dark, sealed up the cave so no fire would be
seen, cut out a chimney for the smoke, then dined on filet of Nazi, chops on the Rhine, and lived to tell the tale.”
    The whore looked me in the eye.
    “You made steak and chops out of a German soldier?” she inquired.
    “Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” I asked her.
    “You just said it.”
    “I wasn’t talking to you. Whores should be fucked but not heard.”
    She signaled to a man at the bar who was a perfect double of the hanged man in the film I’d just seen. Clearly there is a problem of identity here, I thought, as four of the men at the bar
(one looking incredibly like the Captain) moved toward our booth and separated me from Bosco and the blond whore forever.
    The hanged man came for me, while the other three converged on Bosco. We all went down as they stomped and punched us, then dragged us to our feet with the intention, I presume, of taking us
elsewhere to cut our throats. But the hanged man could not resist punching me one more time while one of his fellows held me. Incredibly, I wrenched myself loose, though not in time to escape the
punch, which sent me reeling backward toward the front door of the bar.
    “You Nazi carbuncle,” I said to the hanged man, and the thought came to me then of how well I used the language, and that if I pursued the writing life seriously I might become as
successful in one art form as my father had been in another. The sugar whore came into the bar as I was reeling toward the door and when she saw me falling she let me fall, then took me by the arm
and raised me up. This interrupted my beating and I gathered my wits and kicked the hanged man in the vicinity of the scrotum, causing him what I’d estimate to be moderate pain. While two
thugs dragged Bosco toward the back room, I grabbed the sugar whore by the hand, thinking how our visions, even in dreams, define us, how we are products of the unfathomable unknown, how, for
instance, I knew that my sugar whore was not a whore at all