Excerpt from The Moon and Dead Indians: BILL: Remember that night, hermano? Remember your promise. JON’s crying subsides. A coyote call. You want more to drink? JON: We drank too much. BILL: Did we really, Jonny? Is that possible? JON: That night we did. BILL: Ya! Is that why you forget? JON: We’d swiped a whole keg of booze. The moonlight is harsh. BILL: What was we trying to forget? JON: No. We used it as bait. BILL: We was hunting, then? JON: We set it out in the bright moonlight back of the saloon and waited. BILL: Waited? What in hell for? JON: For something in hell to happen. BILL: Boy, that was hard. All that booze just yards away and us parched. What happened, Jonny boy? JON: I fell asleep. MA comes and stands in the door to the cabin, the Winchester rifle in her hands. BILL: You got to learn how to drink, mijito. JON: But when I woke up, there was that Indian boy there. BILL: That wasn’t no boy. JON: A skinny little Indian who acted all pretty like a girl. BILL: How can they let him get away with that? JON: Flapping his eyelashes like wings. BILL: Indios culiados. JON: You were making signs to him. BILL: No speakum American. JON: Getting him to drink. BILL: He sure understood whiskey. JON: He shouldn’t have been hanging around town like that. BILL: Sure. Served the little sissy right. JON: It got real crazy. BILL: Shit, the redskin liked white boys. What can I say? JON: You tried to get him to pucker up and he! (makes a raspberry) BILL: Ya, I decked the fucker. Don’t play coy boy with Billy. JON cries quietly. What’s wrong, Juanito. Tell your Billy what’s wrong. JON: Why couldn’t we just leave him alone? BILL: Had to teach that Indio culiado a lesson. JON: I didn’t want to do it. BILL: You did it. Hermanos de sangre, mijito. JON: It was so easy. BILL: A sharp edge is all you need. JON: So weird. BILL: Slip it along the hairline and pull and hey it peels off easy as any hide. Such pretty long black hair. Pity we couldn’t show it off. JON: It was crazy how he didn’t wake up then. BILL: That’s why I went for his balls! JON: Jesus. BILL: Fucker’s not going to ignore Billy. JON: Jesus. BILL: That got him going. JON: He was screaming. BILL: What’s wrong, fella? What’s wrong? JON: He was running around. BILL: You lose something? JON: He was crying out in that language of his. BILL: That’ll teach him to speak American. JON: He looked at me, Billy. BILL: Hell, I couldn’t stop laughing. JON: His dark eyes looked at me. BILL: I could not get a hold on it. JON: He reached out his hand covered in blood. BILL: I was pissing myself. JON: The blood looks so black in this light. BILL: And you, you shit, you threw up all that good whiskey. JON: So black. He looked right at me. BILL: And fuck, all that racket he was making, screaming like a chicken in a coyote’s jaws, brought all those jerks out of the saloon. Never saw so many people get so sober so quick in my whole fucking life. JON: I was sober. |