So Here’s The Thing

So Here’s The Thing
by Martin Mundt

© 2007 by Martin Mundt
All Rights Reserved.

Episode 6: El Pollo

So here’s the thing—I will now tell you what happened, but you will not believe me, and that is as it should be. You will say: that old man, he is a liar, or loco, or worse. Or, if you are kind-hearted, you will only think it.

But think it you will.

Your disbelief, however, will not matter, because I saw the thing happen with my own eyes. I, of course, and the Brothers, and El Pollo, but you will hear the story only from my lips.

I knew the Brothers would come to my shop the moment I heard they had arrived in the village. Why else would they come to a place so rich only in dust and heat, except for my shop, except for El Pollo?

You know the Brothers. Everyone knows them, and yet no one knows them. But I shall remind you.

The Brothers were short, with wide shoulders muscled from many years spent with the lifting of the weights in the penitentiary. Like cement walls they were muscled. Their faces were scarred and pockmarked and sunburned, as if the Sun Itself had taken a white-hot pick-ax to them in anger. They had tattooed each other’s bodies from neck to foot, with shaky drawings as only a backward child would draw them—stick figures and planes spitting machine-gun fire and knives stabbing hearts that spurted black blood—and every tattoo on one Brother had its identical twin on the other.

They were twins in everything, neither subtle nor shy. Nor were they known for their forethought or their restraint. They went nowhere but together. They were simpletons, really, but with a single, shared genius, which, for His own mysterious reasons, God had chosen to make murder, rather than fiddle-playing, or, perhaps, ceramics.

They always carried their weapons openly. And why shouldn’t they? Who would stop them? Certainly not I. As I have said, they were neither subtle nor shy, and in particular with their guns.

Their long ponytails were black, as were their dead eyes, and their long overcoats, and their hearts.

I had heard it said—though only in whispers, and those only in fear and shadows—that the Brothers were not truly siblings at all, merely the separate sons of different mothers, and yet so alike in looks and temperament that they could not be distinguished from one another in any way, true brothers of the heart. I believe this story to be false, however, nothing but a rumor spread by their mother—that accursed woman —so as to diminish by half the measure of evil that she had delivered into the world. But this I cannot prove, nor can anyone, because their mother is dead, murdered in a fury of blood, dismemberment and honor. I shall leave it to you to guess by whom the murder was done.

I have even heard it said that they were not truly men at all, but women who only masqueraded as men for inscrutable reasons of their own. And I can say that, if it is true that they were women, then they made exceptionally ugly, violent and worthless men.

No one knew their names. They were simply the Brothers.

So when the bell on my shop-door rang, and they entered, I already knew what would happen next.

Honor would engulf us all in flames and destruction.

The chickens in their cages, they went silent. I had spent my life in that shop, first as apprentice, then as partner, and finally as sole proprietor, so I had lived among the chickens for all the years within my memory. I breathed chickens, I bled chickens, I dreamed chickens. So when the chickens went silent, I felt as if my life itself had stopped.

And I knew the Brothers had finally come.

They stood at my counter like a low wall of arrogance and stupidity, and they looked up at me—have I not already said that they were short?—with that look of theirs that said they would gladly press a bullet between my eyes with only their fingers until it penetrated my skull and brain and killed me. I took no offense. It was merely the Brothers’ way.

“Which cage…” said the Brother on the left.

“…did the gringo die in?” finished the Brother on the right.

I pointed. The cage had remained empty since the day El Pollo had butchered the nameless gringo and stuffed his body inside. The chickens, they could not be made to enter the cage. My hands and arms were covered with the wounds of pecking beaks from trying to force chickens into that cage. So now it stood empty.

The Brothers spat at the cage, then laughed without humor.

“Good…” said the one on the right.

“…riddance,” said the one on the left.

I said nothing. What should I have said? I lived with chickens, often cleaning their bodily fluids. The task of cleaning spittle was not beneath me.

The Brothers turned back to me.

“And where…” said the left-hand one.

“…is El Pollo?” said the right-hand one.

“Old…” said the left.

“…man?” said the right.

You will have guessed by now that I knew this question would come, and you will have guessed as well that I dreaded its coming. For what should I say in answer? What could I say? El Pollo lived among us in the village, and yet we never mentioned the name. What could I say? Who betrays the secrets of the Devil and expects to emerge unscathed?

But here I stood, pressed between El Pollo and the Brothers, and have I not already said that the Brothers are not known for forethought or restraint, and exceptionally free with their weapons? And have I not already said as well that the Brothers were ugly, violent, worthless simpletons with a genius for murder? Painters paint, musicians play, and alas, the Brothers kill.

I opened my mouth to say…something. I no longer know what words I would have spoken.

But the bell on my door rang instead.

I could see who had entered my shop, but the Brothers could not. But they knew nevertheless. Their nostrils flared, as if they could taste El Pollo’s presence on the faint puff of warm breeze that had entered the open door. And why shouldn’t they? They were indeed animals.

“El Pollo,” said the Brother on the left, and he smiled. His right-front tooth shone gold.

“El Pollo…muerte,” said the Brother on the right, and he smiled as well. His left-front tooth shone gold.

I had never seen them smile before, and would never see it again, God be thanked.

And then I witnessed, there in my humble shop, the terrible grandeur of Death at the hands of one’s own towering arrogance and imbecility.

The Brothers spun around, one left, the other right. Their long overcoats swirled like capes, sweeping black veronicas of Death around them. Dull black machine-guns appeared in their four hands like sorcery, and all four began to vomit wild death at once, and bullets filled the air.

Afterwards, I swept the bodies of forty-seven flies from my floor, forty-seven flies struck dead from the very air by the thick ropes of bullets flung by the Brothers. I breathed lead for days.

The air shuddered, and the floor trembled from the thunderous gunfire. They fired as if they each had three arms, so fast did their weapons fly.

And yet, El Pollo flew faster.

What El Pollo did defied physics, defied logic, defied even possibility; and yet, must I not believe my eyes?

El Pollo took wing, as a chicken does, but more so. Feathers scattered, wings flapped. And El Pollo evaded each and every bullet, as if running between the raindrops of a thunderstorm without being even so much as moistened by a single drop. Contorting this way, then that way, sometimes even—I swear by God’s knuckles that my eyes saw the thing happen!—sometimes even two or three different impossible directions at once, as no body, human or chicken, could conceivably do.

The bullets, however, they tore my poor shop to pieces in their hundreds, or perhaps thousands.

The Brothers danced a grand, vicious, beautiful, bloodthirsty tango of Death, the sound of their guns like a million heels striking my floor, each and every step synchronized, practiced from the womb, as if they possessed only a single mind between them. The Brothers even re-loaded each others’ weapons as they moved, so attuned was each to the movements of the other.

Never had I seen the dealing of Death appear so—yes, I must use the word, though it certainly must be a blasphemy to so utter it—so angelic.

Their genius stole my very breath with its luminous beauty and sensual elegance.

And still El Pollo flew around them untouched, over them unscathed, from ceiling to floor unharmed, left and right unbloodied, hovering and falling unstruck. And yet within the random nature of the flight existed direction, within the unstable tumble of wings and body existed balance. Have I somehow implied panic within El Pollo’s movements? It was not so. Have I unwittingly implied that El Pollo somehow only reacted to the Brothers’ initiative? This too was not so.

El Pollo danced an intricate paso doble against the Brothers’ tango, dancing the bullfighter against their raging bulls. El Pollo danced everywhere, followed by bullets, until finally, the dancers met.

The Brothers had become separated, but so subtly had El Pollo orchestrated this result that I at first had not even noticed the impossibility of it. And, astonishingly, neither had the Brothers. I had never seen them separated, and yet, there they stood, more than an arm’s length away from each other.

And El Pollo flew between them, followed by four streams of bullets so close together they were like the ripping teeth of four chainsaws.

Which crossed, and met.

The Brothers sawed each others’ bodies open from crotch to forehead with their own weapons. They fell and lay helpless on my floor amid spreading pools of blood, one here, the other there. They did not cry out. Instead, with eyes fixed on each other, they began to pull themselves across my floor with only their fingertips, inch by painful inch, in exquisite agony, slowly sliding through the sawdust even as they became nothing but dust themselves. It seemed as if they wished to crawl into each other’s wounds and thereby make themselves whole again.

To see their fingers struggle, to see their separation, possibly for the first time in their lives, was to feel sympathy for them. Can I say that I felt sympathy for the cold-blooded Brothers at that moment without seeming myself monstrous and inhuman? I did not wish to spare them their pain, for they deserved it, and I did not wish to spare them their deaths, for they deserved those doubly so, but I did wish to spare them the knowledge that they had killed each other, each the only human being in the other’s life that they had ever loved, and who had loved them in return. That seemed to me the drop that overflowed their cup of bitterness, and so I admit I would have spared them that, had I been able.

But I could not, for have I not already said, repeatedly, over and over and over again, until you must be sick and tired of hearing it, that I am nothing but an old man who sells chickens, and so the granting of forgetfulness is not within my power.

“Bro…” whispered one.

“…ther,” sighed the other.

And then the widening pools of their blood touched, like two fingers, and their strength failed them, and they died.

And so ended my measure of sympathy for the Brothers. More than they deserved. But in the end, I must admit they died the manly deaths of brothers.

But what did sympathy, or brotherly love, or manliness mean to El Pollo? Nothing, I tell you. But neither did revenge, or humiliation, or dishonor.

El Pollo stood near the door, and one of his eyes rolled slowly back to find me. By the Virgin, I swear I heard it click as it moved, like the cylinder of a revolver.

I crossed myself to ward off its unholy gaze.

And what, you ask, did I see in the eye of a heartless, murderous chicken?

How can I say what I saw? Do we, as humans, not have great, even insurmountable difficulties in the understanding even of other humans? Then how, I ask you, was I to understand a chicken?

No, no, what I saw in that eye was no glimpse into the soul of El Pollo, but rather a glimpse into myself—and what I learned of myself, I will not say, for who could be interested in how an old man came so late to such small wisdom? All I will say is that, for me, the experience expanded my consciousness, as I have heard the long-haired gringos say when they come searching for the ‘bonus weed.’

El Pollo then had a choice—either walk out my door, or kill me where I stood, and of course you know which choice El Pollo made, because here I am, telling my tale.

So, I have told you a story, and of course you will refuse to believe it. This does not reflect badly on you, for the story is truly unbelievable, but I tell you, I was there, and so I know it to be true. But you were not there, so I must blame myself for your disbelief, because the words and I, we are not great friends. But you must bear instead, I think, the greater misfortune, for you must spend the rest of your days wondering at my story, and fearing the truth of it.

Martin Mundt exists elsewhere in the virtual world at:
www.martinmundt.com
www.crawlingabattoir.com
&
www.myspace.com/martinmundt