Pigs

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.   Matthew 23:27 (English Revised Version)

Teule- The Aztec name for gods when confronted by Cortez on horseback

‘Brad?’ he called to the Captain, ‘Where exactly are we going? I could leave a message for Rod to join us.’

Brad’s tactful smile faded and came back instantly. His right eyebrow arched beneath the new tactful smile. ‘Hey Simon, I wish I could tell you more than I know but all I know is we are going to a rancho. Some American rich guy thinks we got a fine vessel here and wants to celebrate our coming in and settin’ anchor.’

‘How are we getting to the rancho?’

‘Hell, I don’t know, probably a limousine? I really don’t know, but it’s a small town and I’m sure they will find us on the boat here.’ Brad’s eyes squinted and his smile broadened as two black Land Rovers pulled up to the landing beach with one tapping his horn twice. Brad raised his arm and waved.

‘Here we go, boys. First class all the way. Let’s get ashore and partee,’ Brad yelled out.

Everybody responded with whoops, except Simon, who bit his lip, looking along the beach strand from one end to the other but it was empty of anybody. He followed them over the rail looking up and down the beach as he gained the dinghy and placed his oars and pushed off. .

A tall ornate gate opened at their arrival and closed at their passing. Simon could see two men in dark guaybara shirts and dark shorts standing and looking at the dust of the vehicles and them. The main house was a sprawling sight of pale whitewash, arches and red tiled roofs. It seemed set into the jungle but had nothing planted at its front. There was no driveway, just a dusty ending to the entrance road. As they rolled out of the Land Rovers Simon could see around the edges of the buildings and through some of the arches that there was no jungle, merely a field on both sides after a fern facade of wavy grasses and a few acacia trees. In the distance was the real jungle. He stood there wondering at the landscape concept until Brad boomed in a cheery pronouncement.

‘Betterin’ Vallarta, boys.’ 

And that was the signal to enter so they all started walking toward an arch following two men who were also in dark guayabara shirts and dark shorts. They were tough looking with shaved heads and thick necks. Simon could not tell what nationality they were since they all seemed to have well tanned browns in their colourings. The men did not say a word but led the crew with smiling friendly faces and hand gestures. Simon was imagining them using their obvious muscle that seemed violently intense under the loose shirts.

The crew moved gently through a spacious open entrance hall into a large gardened area. A large, round, three-tiered fountain softly sprayed water from a simple ball at its head and trickled a steady flow of whooshing sounds over each tier to end in gurgling base. The air was cooler as they passed with snickers and mumblings. On the other side of the fountain and to each side of a long aqua watered swimming pool were small cottages, framed by little palm gardens with two lounging chairs, and one of those was occupied by a darkly tanned body with long dark hair hanging and dark sunglasses reflecting the sun.

Music started up. Bob Marley was singing Buffalo Soldier and the bodies all rose to dance their ways toward the sailors. The crew had open mouths, even Simon.

‘Welcome noble mariners,’ a very well dressed man with a half smile spoke from their right side. He also wore the guayabara shirt and dark shorts, but was holding a martini glass with liquid slightly moving. ‘I hope you enjoy yourselves.’ He turned and called out, ‘Play The Fingers of Mystery for our friends, Ramon.’

Simon did not believe the man was American by his slightly detectable accent and the aristocratic way that he held himself. His hair was closely cropped and seemed to lay upon his head, its colour almost the same as his skin. The man was watching the crew taking drinks from a silver tray offered by one of the finely featured women and his smile grew higher on the side of his face forcing his right cheek to protrude a bit. As Simon sipped his mescal his eyes met the man’s eyes. The man smiled even more deeply as the hazel of his eyes grew faint. The man turned his head slowly and inclined his head behind one of the cottages toward a large incongruously placed, empty pig pen.

Simon felt bumped and looked over at Brad. How sloppy, he thought, looking at his captain’s whiskers clumped with muck, skin pale and twitching. Simon was smart; he got to the mud pool first and was not about to move over even for Brad. He would just ignore him. Simon shut his eyes, feeling Brad’s pressured weight trying to move him. Brad looked down at the mud. His skin twitched from the heat of the sun. He opened his mouth, strained and looked up at the sky. It was blue. His head dropped back down again to see the coolness of the day’s earth but he just saw his boots on hard baked clay. A gun shot pulled his head around to a cushion of noises. The noises were mixed but defining his views of an old western town divided by a central building that had the word BANK and vee’d out into two dusty streets.

To his left was a sleepy town with kids rolling a wheel with a stick from one side of the street to the other. Three women carried overflowing laundry baskets while chatting along a boarded, balcony and awning shaded walkway. All wore the old western costumes out of a movie, he was thinking.

To his right came the noises. A man lay in the middle of the street with people stripping his clothes off. Hatted men on both sides of that scene were staggering, some with colourfully dressed women under their arms. Horses were tied side to side blocking some of the view but he could see cowboy-style hats bobbing alongside derbies, dusty caps and angled fedoras. Musics clashed into skittering harmonies of classical, rinky-tink, Mexican ballads, barbershop unisons, religious dramatics.

Brad started to walk toward the sleepy left side but jerked himself upright, smiled and changed course for the active town side. He wanted some fun and kids-with-moms did not add up to much of that.

Brad heard his spurs jingle and his rough leather boots clunk on the boardwalk as he smiled looking down at his two revolvers in crisscrossed belts and holsters at his hips. As he put his hands around the brown handles of the guns he bumped into a man coming the other way.

‘Sorry,’ he looked up as the man passed.

The man stopped and turned. ‘Whad you say?’

He was rough-looking with a salt and pepper beard laying on his chest. His dark derby was too big for his head and came down to the eyebrows. His right hand was on the handle of his gun and his eyes looked dazed.

‘I said sorry for bumpin’ you. I was looking at my guns.’ Brad smiled his warmest smile.

‘Draw motherfucker!’

‘What?’

‘You heard me you wigglin’ bitch dog.’ The man began pulling his gun out of his holster but still had the strap around the hammer. He was fumbling with the strap when a bullet tore into his chest making a hole in the two shirts he wore and pushing him back a few steps. He looked up at Brad, down at the hole, then fumbled again with the strap and fell forward at Brad’s feet, showing a big hole in his back.

Brad turned around to see a scraggly haired blonde woman in baggy trousers and a bright red shirt levering another round into her Winchester rifle. She smiled at Brad, inclining her head for him to move over. Brad moved two steps to his right. She shot the downed man in his derby and parts of his scalp blew onto the boardwalk.

She yelled to Brad, ‘You mine now, girlie.’

Brad looked around. A crowd was spilling out onto the street heading for him.

Brad was pushed and shoved down the street by the mob. Awaiting was a hangman’s scaffold of old wood. A few withered floral wreaths were being touched by a faint breeze under the framework. The crowd stopped in front of it with grumblings and dull cheers. A man set up a small stand on wheels to the side of the scaffold and was selling hot wieners rolled in tortillas. Men and women were waiting, drinking from bottles and mugs. The hot wieners sold out fast and the man took off his dirty apron, pulled his bowler hat down over his left eye and smiled gaping teeth to the crowd.

Shoved slightly to the side Brad saw a bearded face upside down draped on the broad shoulder of a giant of a man dressed in a dark woollen suit. Brad wondered how he had his clothes made. The upside down face draped down the man’s shoulder was half covered with blood, mixed into a stiff and uplifted salt and pepper beard. He had very yellow teeth. Somebody in front of the giant was also carrying the corpse and lifted his legs to pass two older ladies who were smiling at the body and nodding gaily.

The body was passed up to three men kneeling on the scaffolding who pulled it up and lay it prone. They stood looking down at the body and discussed something, then one turned and untied the hangman’s noose line from a metal cleat on the upright, while another pulled the noose down to the head of the dead man. The third lifted the man’s head and helped getting the noose around and down to the neck. They both were pulling and manoeuvring the noose under the man’s long beard. Finally satisfied all three took the line and pulled the man to an upright position. The first one retied the line. The dead man was now in a sitting position with his head bent awkwardly to make his face look toward the heavens.

The scraggly-haired blonde woman ran up the steps on the side of the scaffold with her hands raised, rifle in her right one, smiling and bowing her head in short nods to a cheering crowd. They escalated their cheering and whistling when she stood in a proud pose of hands on hips and rifle crossed behind her spread buckskin trousers. Brad, caught up in the celebration, looking at the elation in the crowd, found himself laughing at the triumph. He looked at the woman again, who was standing directly over the body in her pose and started yelling yays .

The blonde raised a long knife in the air with her left hand and the crowd quieted to silence. She knelt gently on one knee and lowered her rifle to the platform. She dramatically shifted the knife to her right hand. Brad looked around at the smiling expectancy running across the faces of those nearest. She pointed the knife out to the crowd who were now completely silenced.

The woman pushed back her hair from her face as she surveyed the prone man. A light breeze blew the hairs back over her face. Her shoulder twisted as the knife went low and was buried in the dead man’s clothing. She looked at its place and her arms moved, one holding the body steady, the other twisting and turning in short movements.

She looked up and out at the crowd, licking her lips and smiling. With one coordinated movement she pushed his body off the scaffolding and rose with a handful of material that fell away to reveal a penis with hairy balls attached. Brad’s mouth dropped open as the crowd began laughing and screaming and moving forward toward the slowly rotating body. They all seemed to have knives out, even the two older ladies held long blades up in the air.

The scraggly-haired woman had the penis in her mouth and bit hard. Brad turned away feeling as though his stomach was being pulled out. He was held in place and could not turn completely around. The crowd was steadily moving forward and he was pressured toward the scaffolding but would not look up, just down at shoes, boots and trousers.

An elbow jabbed Brad’s shoulder as one of the men holding him broke free and tried to jump into a vacated spot ahead of them. Brad saw people cutting small sections of the now naked torso that flowed with blood and hung with organs. It turned, stopped, jiggled, turned, stopped, jiggled with hands reaching and holding and knives striking, sticking and sawing, slicing and gouging at chunks of him.

Brad’s stomach reacted vomiting yellow bile onto his boots. Laughter echoed around him as he retched again and again until the dry heaves left him hiccupping horrible odours, paralleling the blood, flesh, guts and excrement smells facing his cast down eyes. He had been moved to the corpse and was standing in a purple, black, red and fleshy pool of what was once a person. The body touched the top of his head. He wanted to faint.

The blonde turned him and stood in front, toe to toe. He roamed up her buckskin, form lingering at creases in what was obviously a sensuous woman and into her sparkling blue eyes. She was smiling and saying something. Then she screwed up her pixie face with crushed brows of worry and grabbed his arm, pulling him to the side of the scaffolding and past the stairs.

The town whirled by in bright sunlight and deep shadow, creaking stairs and a shining door knob. There were rushes of feelings, laughing, cries, wet than dry, then soft splashes. The water was cloudy and smelled of sulphur. Brad’s knees were bare islets. He moved them and the water of their wakes splashed softly against the copper sides of a deep tub. He willed his hands to cap his knees and they did.

A crack of floor moved his eyes around a lamp-lit room. The ceiling lamps were double-wicked and bright just under glowing the light of the two on the wall fixed between two windows of outside night. Another lit lamp stood on a table next to a bed against another wall. A hand touched Brad’s left shoulder. Another’s hair caressed his own hair.

Brad turned his head around and up to her smiling down at him. She was naked and pale where her clothes covered, almost brown on hands and face. Her blonde hair wore white highlights and flickered gold from a ceiling lamp of three globes hanging behind her from a dark beam holding a white ceiling.

The words flowed through the water to him, ‘You are so wonderful. I am so lucky to have you.’

Brad worried thought into place. He wasn’t a pig. He owned guns. She shot a man who wanted to shoot him. He stopped and looked around, finding his clothes neatly hanging next to her clothes on wooden clothes hooks next to a door. Their boots were strewn beneath them. Several guns in holsters, knives and a rifle lay in a pile next to the bed near the door and in shadows of the lighting.

‘You lookin’ at the bed? You want to fuck some more? Damn.’ Her words were somehow comforting, like his mother’s when he was a toddler. What memories. Was he in the Wild West with his mother? No. He looked back up at her.

‘What’s your name?’ he said to see if he could talk. He had be cautious, Brad thought.

‘Sirena… you don’t remember my name? I always remember names. Everybody says it’s a wonder but if a man passes through town and I meets him at the general store if he comes back three years later I remembers his name. Always been like that and lots of people are movin’ through town, I tell ya.’

‘What’s the name of the town?’

‘Hunh? Town don't have a name. Don’t need one, does it?’