With this he broke down completely, sobbing. This was how it always ended. Though she held on to her dad, her body shaking with his wrenching sobs, Annie was afflicted once more by that strange emptiness, all her feeling throbbing in her skin and nerves, pushed as far as possible away from her numb core. This had gone on, would go on, forever.

How dare Bennet come to visit me as if he owned me, telling me I had no right to break Goldwin’s heart. What is Bennet? Goat’s scrotum; flaccid snapped head of a plucked rooster; calf’s tongue hanging from a butcher’s hook. His salute is the erect tail and wink of the naked anus. His brain is a damp cave, ceilinged with bats, out of the clustered, hairy bodies of which droop obscenely phallic stalactites. In the town of the impotent, Bennet is king. He rules us sitting on an upturned chamber pot, his three bestial daughters leashed at his heels. He flings them, now and then, a bull’s pizzle to gnaw. He has a will of blind rut. All around him yipping, gibbering, snorting, crouch his loyal retainers: sapless Magnus, who laps his wife’s blood from small incisions at night and hangs from his ceiling memorizing poems to trap another fool; Goldwin the bibulous barber, who lets his bloodhound bitches litter on his bed, who visibly struggles with the instinct to shove his snout into your crotch; Otto the bitter with a face to make a Neanderthal weep, his heart a hazelnut, ash its meat, who bought himself a concubine neither flesh nor fish, neither Caliban nor Ophelia, who opens her rotted mouth to curse the flowers and lays her shadow to bed in the waters; Siggy, the human hemorrhoid, pried from Bennet’s ass, where he lived snug for years; blank Finn the mindless, his ejaculations a muddy slope down which he careens, dragging us all.

PISGAH 1952

                                                      PISGAH
1952

THE FIRELIGHT IN THE DARK FOREST FLUNG THE men’s writhing shadows against the trees. A dead raccoon hung from a nearby branch. Far off, the hounds bayed. Huddled to that sow of fire, the men had been drinking for hours.

“Where I lived in Ireland”—Finn spoke up suddenly, apropos of nothing in particular—“buncha these English fellas used to hunt foxes. Sure, it wasn’t fancy. No horses or nothing. Pelt across the fields, they would, chasing the hounds, tooting their little horns. Funny, isn’t it? Wherever you go, it’s the same.” He was hunkered close to the flames, roasting a hot dog.

To Finn’s right, Otto continued to throw his hunting knife absently at the ground, trying, without success, to get it to stick in blade first. Sal shifted away a little, since Otto was throwing it perilously close to his foot, and settled into the place just vacated by Goldwin, who had wandered to the margins of the clearing to listen to his hounds. The barber’s favorite, Mina, a pure redbone, too old and sick to keep up with the pack, dragged herself after him, crumpling at his heels whenever he stopped. Magnus was standing also, leaning on his staff and staring gravely into the fire like some old soothsayer. Siggy, cutting himself a chaw, lay slumped in a folding chair beside Bennet, who sat on a cooler, grim potentate with his Easter Island head, holding his rifle like a scepter across his lap.