The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [0]
ALSO BY BOSTON TERAN
God Is a Bullet
Never Count Out the Dead
The Prince of Deadly Weapons
Trois Femmes
Giv: The Story of a Dog and America
CREED
VIOLENCE
of
BOSTON TERAN
TO
The original Rawbone, whom I hunted for years
AND TO
Lazaro, for that box of penny postcards and the tale of Senor Death
Though this is a work of fiction, certain details, backgrounds, places, and particular events are based on historical fact.
PART I
ONE
-- E WAS BORN in Scabtown the day Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. Scabtown was a parasitic hive of gaming, crib houses and red-eye across the river from Fort McKavett, Texas.
He was raised in a brothel behind Saloon Number 6. His mother was a whore, his father one of the nameless who knew her bed. The boy was nine when she died from a knife wound over money.
He took to living in a crate of wood slats he'd cobbled together under some trees near the riverbank. He carried slops and beer for pay; there was no job too menial, none too difficult. When the pestilence came he earned wages helping an army doctor with the sick and dying.
Death did not frighten him. Its heady reek meant nothing. He was much like the landscape he'd been born of, a vision hostile and burned. And of those narrow streets that are the souls of men he had seen much and learned.
He huddled alone in that tiny hut with only a ratty blanket about him. His dreams were tortuous and often sad, his childhood waylaid by reality. Most nights he was left to watching the kerosene lamps in the windows of that filthy hamlet and what stories were told there.
The boy hated his name. After his mother died he never spoke it. A prizefighter came to Fort McKavett. His face was battered, the cheeks swollen and craggy. He was not a large man, but he had enormous scarred fists and a thick back. On the parade grounds he fought a much bigger man in the baking sun. The boy watched as the fighters stalked each other round by round over that shadowless dust. It was all blood and exhaustion. But the smaller man would not be defeated and it came to be that the boy saw himself in that knotted frame, and when finally the other fighter succumbed, dropping to his knees on the blood-soaked earth, the boy experienced a place of power within himself that he could never have imagined existed. The fighter's name was Rawbone, and from that day forward it was what the boy called himself.
Not long after that he killed his first man. A drunk who'd wandered lost, after his time with a whore, down to the river darkness. He knifed the man as his own mother had been knifed and then he stole his money. The coins had blood on them and he washed them in the river till they shined.
THE ROAD OUT of Sierra Blanca followed its course through bleached and silent reaches toward the Rio Grande. From a promontory Rawbone watched an approaching island of dust rising up and away with the wind. It was 1910 and there was chaos throughout the border country of Texas.
Through the rivery heat of a white noon Rawbone began to make out details amidst the dust. It was a truck, a three-tonner. One of those new Packards, or maybe an Atlas, all bulked down and lashed with goods. The open cab was shaded by a tarp stretched across a frame supported by metal stanchions welded to the chassis. The gray tarp fluttered madly like some magic carpet. There were two men in the cab, a driver on the right and the other on the left with his boots up on the dash.
It was the one beside the driver who saw first this figure walking into the shadowless void of the road far ahead, waving a hat. He pointed.
"Now what might that be?" said the driver.
The other reached for a carbine and straddled it across his legs. They continued through the heat a long while until they came upon a raggedy, meager-looking fellow whose most prominent features were a huge forehead and tightly boned eyes.
The truck slowed and the men stared with hard vigilance as the fellow in the road called, "Please, stop." As the truck drew close Rawbone saw how its sides had been