unwelcomeness

I read it and then look up at everyone’s personal expectant face-muscle arrangements, and I say What’s written here is some ass-kicking druidic or older unholy incantatory kind of instruction-list, probably, in a language strange to us, and it’s going to take a while, hanging with Bog Man, him slowly teaching us what these characters mean, etc., for us to understand it, but maybe it’s actually better if we never do, because who knows what kind of shit we’d be summoning if we were to learn how to pronounce this stuff. I look at Bog Man and he seems to be checked out, looking into the middle distance, in the direction of a tire store and an ampm.

Let’s see it, says Dwarf. I hand it over. His face gets confused, then solemn, then scared. He’s right, says Dwarf, handing it back to me, whereupon I shove it in my back pocket. Later we can examine, translate this, I say. The joke’s on them. On the piece of paper the Bog Man drew what looks like two stick-figures, one butt-fucking the other. Under this he’s written the words: DESERT LOVE.

We destroy some townspeople, burn their dwellings. We are like the Super Friends, but evil, and some of us stink, eat carrion, are dead, etc. For instance, Cranberry, so named because of his dark red complexion, is pretty much completely intolerable. He seems to be hanging with us for selfish reasons, or because he’s been told to by Dwarf’s dad, or like maybe because he expects to reap a lot of booty, like he thinks that it’s going to make him a better person or something. But it’s like, Hey, fucker, that’s a naïve expectation, because if you knew anything you’d know that the horrors of plundering are a double-edged sword, and those of us who are unlucky enough to destroy as a vocation lose our rosy outlook after the first five minutes. But no one says this to him because it’d be an admission of thinking about what he feels like in the first place, which would be uninteresting. There’s not much to plunder anyhow. Some Cherry Cokes, a cat, one lady had a couple of granola bars. Cats are edible but tricky to field-dress. We eat the granola bars and share the Cokes, since there’s five of us and only three Cokes.

Bog Man expresses zero interest in our granola bars and instead pokes his blackening fingers into a crusty pouch tied to his waist with a cord of braided leather, or hair. From this he fishes out what looks like a scrap of soggy tree fungus, which he holds with the tips of all his fingers, like the atoms are slippery and might disperse at any time. He tries to bite it but can’t, sticks it in his mouth hole, it falls out. He bends his neck in the direction of his lap but it only goes halfway, and makes alarming creaking sounds. I nod to Dwarf and he picks up the fungus and tears it up into tiny pieces and puts each into the Bog Man’s mouth one at a time, washing them down with Coke. The bog man’s neck is stretched out, his mouth pointing at the sky. At this point it’s hard to tell what’s really all that different about Bog Man and say, the mud he’s sitting in. The hazy air’s obviously deteriorating him.