The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [63]
We got an empty belly and an itch we can't scratch.
He watched her with fanatical concentration; Dante liked the way her haunches rolled when she walked, the way her strong brown hand gripped the handle of the suitcase. He might be half-blind, but he could still spot an Indian a mile away.
When would these women learn they just shouldn't travel alone? Chicago was a rough town; a lady's luck could turn bad any moment, thought Dante, and here she was tempting fate, walking around near the station after dark. As if she ain't asking for trouble, strutting her stuff so shameless, trying to pass for white. Immoral is what it was.
What this squaw needed was to be taught a lesson, and
Dante Scruggs was her man. The thought of their future intimacy made him shiver: He would make himself known to every inch of that brown body before they were through. Then he would take her down to the Green River.
But first he waited for a sign; there, the horse by the hitching post. Its tail twitched to the left, then again: twice in a row.
Yes. The Voices wanted this one____
The woman turned a corner and he followed her.
Against the concrete, brick, and cast iron of the new Chicago that had sprung up since the fire in '71, Dante Scruggs's native coloring provided remarkable camouflage. He wasn't handsome, but you wouldn't call him ugly. Average height, blond and boyish, features plump and mild, like his middle-class shopkeeper folks back in Madison, Wisconsin. He looked ten years younger than his thirty-nine and there was no way to pick him out of a crowd. He wasn't big; most of his remarkable strength was in his outsize farmer's hands: He could crack walnuts with 'em. Smart enough to stay one step ahead of the police and two away from jail, Dante showed the world a bland, kindly face. A person would never notice his glass eye unless they were up close and looking right at it; the iris, as blue as a robin's egg, had no pupil painted on it.
Dante was a breed of man the mechanized world had only just begun to produce. He moved through life casting no shadow while inside he was all hooks, darkness, and ripping pain. He had long ago given up resisting the Voices he heard in his head, and he believed with a servant's humility that once he read their signs it was simply his job to obey.
He pictured the city as a jungle and himself a predator at the top of its food chain; that gave a dignity to what he perceived as his life's work. The U.S. Army had thought enough of his appetite for handing out discipline to make him a platoon sergeant. He put fifteen years in before the massacre at Wounded Knee revealed to his superiors the extent of Dante's enthusiasm for expressing his true nature.
Soldiers in his unit who had been near him dining the engagement testified that Dante had lost all human restraint after that Dakota arrow took out his eye. But then again, they argued, with his sight so badly damaged, how could he be expected to distinguish women and children? The Army had grudgingly bought that argument, buried his excesses in the cover-up. A quiet discharge with honors soon followed, fully pensioned.
Dante interpreted his misfortune differently; the wound opened up a whole new world. He imagined that his lost eye had simply been turned around to look inside and clarified the Voices. And ever since he'd been so grievously wounded, the Voices granted him permission to exact the sort of retribution he'd only been able to dream about: nine murders in three years that nobody would ever connect him to.
With his pension coming in, he didn't