1921
There was gray smoke aswirl round the train station and heavy fog with the odor of coal through which itinerants came and went, departed and boarded. As he stepped onto the curb a sensation of aimlessness struck him suddenly, one that he hadn't felt so acutely before in his life. The railway commute had been long and interconnected. Three stops at least and many days between them. It had been well over a month, he knew, since he'd bore witness to that blue infinity called the Pacific. Well over two, come to think of it. When in transit the laws of perceived time and space become rubbery and opaque. To sit back and relax and sleep and do nothing but read and think while the wheels beneath you whisk you away to a fixed, predestined point. It was effortless, and he loved that about it. He was one well acquainted with travel, you could say, and the railway was his favorite permutation of it. He'd become accustomed to living upon it, erecting a kind of camp that was stationary and always in motion. What money he had saved went all towards train tickets and he subsisted in the dining car among the rich and the poor with their wine and sandwiches. At night he was rocked to sleep as an infant in the warm bosom of the top bunk. The low, constant roar of the locomotive axles rotating drowned out all human sounds; the snoring, farting, grumbling. He could survey a full swath of the country and its populace there. Every denomination of American, or close to it. Dirty vagabonds that had stowed themselves as clandestine barnacles upon a merchant vessel, those who attached and for a couple days stayed until abruptly falling away as though they had never been there at all. Only their stench acknowledged by the fine-tailored misters and madams clutching their jewelry and derby hats. Some would turn their noses up towards him too no doubt for the pigmentation of his skin and if not that then at least the quality of his wardrobe. They would find their reason to be offended, as was their sport. He was an easy target, he knew it and had always known it. A man of no nation, no family, no roots tied to the earth or his fellow men. It wasn't antipathy on his part, or even a pervasive isolationism. It was survival, simply. The way of the road, the method of detachment that eschewed the games of wolves and sheep altogether. If only it were that simple, that easy a commitment. But this would buy his new beginning, arriving here at last in the mecca of western civilization.
When his mind wandered on the train, his head slouched against the glass and the seat cushion of his bedding, he would ponder how differently his path could've taken. Had he known his father and mother for more than his first four years, if he could now remember their names or faces or the sound of their voices. The old man had purportedly been a Union veteran and one of the only negroes to occupy his own land in the region. Somewhere in Kansas, he was told. He was told also that his mother was half Cheyenne, and though there were no obvious means to prove it he always felt intrinsically that it was true. They gave him up to the orphan house for reasons never specified. He considered it once hopeful to assume they did so against their wills but as he followed that reasoning it became clearer it might not've been a better alternative after all. Where were they now? More than likely dead in the ground, perhaps sparing him in his youth a more vivid understanding of loss and the wounds it creates. The lady of the orphanage was his parent. Mother, and father. She was a hard woman. Her knuckles wide-spread, wrists stocky like a man's. Like his. She was hard but she was fair, in ways he could only comprehend years after. She taught the value of the written word as though it were as lethal as any munition against the inevitable enemies of life. Adversity, injustice. As she taught he felt often she was speaking to him alone, the way she would meet his eyes as she scanned across the classroom. Some strange kinship recognized between them there, unspoken. A bronze crucifix dangling about her cleavage and her dark hair pulled tight above her spectacles. Round and gold-rimmed, not unlike the pair he wore now. He was nearsighted, mildly, but they were worn principally to be a kind of deterrent against those who might be inclined to cause him untoward agitation. In this land it took more than combat prowess and precision of aim to fight well against the wolves and the vultures. It was the strength of the mind that was most paramount. To be smarter than the other guy, more cunning. Cultivating when necessary methods of subterfuge and misdirection. Appearing small, weak, invisible. It came naturally.
Violence had seemed a thing which followed him incessantly and deliberately. A hunting dog loping upon four legs at his scent. He did not cherish it nor call it out to himself but it nonetheless was never too far from catching him regardless of how far and how deep he hid. The first fight was sudden and stark like a lightning strike against the side of his face. He tumbled to the grass from the stump he was sitting on and the child who struck stood over him and reeled back his fist again and he took two more of his blows before he procured a grip on his ankle and wrenched him down and throttled him with both hands until his eyes lolled up and back into his head and his tongue stuck out. He could've killed him. It was an instant realization and the gasps on the faces of the onlookers said they shared in it. Bewildered spectators gawking at the pit spectacle. In the middle of their surrounding surged through him vindication and he was terrified of it. That intoxicating, exhilarating sensation of having dominion over a lesser creature. What the hawk might feel when its talons sink into the rabbit. Not one of them interfered save her, the missus. She took him by the ear crying and locked him in her office while she tended to the other boy. He bawled like the child he was, all of eight years old. Were it not for her he could've faced some terrible ends that day. People, his people, had been strung up for less, even as young as he was. She told him the tears were good. She said they would see them, the neighbors and the parents, and they would take pity on him. He would employ that tactic skillfully, but once he got older it would lose its advantage, once the raw fibrous chords of his emotions were buried under layers of callous truculence and muscle definition.
He had taken up work in Arkansas when the whispers of war began to matriculate amongst common hired hands and farm workers. There was some inclination in him even then that he'd be caught in its global tumult, like a great storm he could see in the far horizon growing and lurching inevitably toward him. That spirit of violence itself amassing power. Hibernating, one might say, in its relative absence. He'd seen glimpses of its face here and there in the eyes of rankled drunkards and scorned lovers. Slurred speech and hatred boiling red over on their cheeks. But it hadn't come to his doorstep; he'd fixed a posture against it, migrating to avoid its wrath. Wandering of his late teens running into adulthood, if such a thing could be given stringent parameters. It was as though it was setting the perfect trap for him, its prey, and in that year nineteen-seventeen, he was taken by the draft and conscripted in the fight against the Kaiser and his soldiers. The great war, they called it. The war to end all wars. What myopic arrogance it was. Any measure of sympathy to the cause he harbored was a meager, flaccid hope that like a pilot light extinguished completely when he laid his bespectacled vision upon the utterly excoriated passage of Belgium referred to as the Western Front. A hellish portrait more abhorrent than any Sunday school lesson could describe. Men whose flesh peeled off their feet from months of wading in mud and rivers of excrement. A moist, rancid, pale leprosy. Epidemics of fever and gangrene and parasites carried by trench rats more insidious a threat than German artillery. Gutter life. The freshest crop of the country's best and brightest dumped by the boatfull into holes in the ground half a world away with the refuse atop the dead and the dying. There was near his position a corpse visible above the rim of the trench that had been tangled up in barbed wire and ventilated through by machine gun fire. Over days and weeks he watched the body hang and soak in constant rainfall. Several of his unit took bets on how long it would take for it to finally fall, if it would. No one could quite recall who he was, or even which side to whom he belonged. It seemed not to matter one way or the other. Dead was dead, and this place was submerged in it. Mounds of horseflesh stinking half-hidden in the lingering fog of gunpowder and mustard gas intermixed with their scalloped riders. On one side of the field the antique vestiges of the old world threw themselves against the wall of mechanized warfare, becoming obsolete in a single charge.
Over there he saw a new world roll over the one he previously knew. A world in its beginning perhaps; no, more like an evolution, like the monarch bursting out from the husk of its former self. He really shouldn't have been surprised, he would think later. But even his cynicism, well tempered as it was, was found lacking, unable to brace against such a realized horror. He could see reverberations of it in the stare of some of the boys, the redness around the eyelids and the vacancy in their pupils. Some kind of injury of the soul, undiagnosable. Why he wasn't affected the same he could only wonder. It was a strange feeling of inadequacy, being among the downtrodden veterans in the tenement building he occupied. Scullery fires in trash barrels under bridges and byways. Sharing tobacco and hobo cuisine with the dirty and trembling whom he trusted just enough to not gut him. Sheathed at the small of his back was the trench knife he had carried from France all the way there. Just in case, always. In the long suitcase he walked with from the train station there was a scopeless Springfield rifle, disassembled, and a Colt 1911 pistol with no ammunition to speak of. They were gifts courtesy of the United States government, so to speak. And valuable gifts they were, though he was reticent to trade them, even when he found himself hungry and cold in this contemptuous city. In his little hovel up five flights of stairs, cohabiting with rats the size of small canines. Familiar, this. Not the Edenic land of promise he allowed himself to believe it was. Often he returned in his thoughts to the grass sea of Kansas, to retrace antecedent footsteps and make better of them this time.
Work was scarce, and indignant. They were jobs endured rather than embraced from taciturn taskmasters who treated him as a thing only a little more sophisticated than a beast of burden. White men who dealt in epithets with nearly every breath that passed from their lips; words like monkey, coon, nigger spitting in his direction with an indifference somehow worse than the deliberate, fervent hatred. Those who had lived in their prejudice so long and so well it manifested on their bodies like gout, like arthritic limps. This city was not some fantasy land and there were none he could find enlightened anymore than there had been in other province of the country. He loaded trucks and trains, their engines puttering temptations for his escape. His arms, shoulders, back grew stronger and they drew the attention of ringmasters who thought they saw profit in his experience with combat. They came as pied pipers spinning honeyed tales of riches and autonomous living and once again he found himself at a crossroad. He could run, just like he had so many times before, but to do so would be admitting defeat. He hadn't wandered so far to turn back; there had to be some treasure hidden in this labyrinth, some peace of mind there to grab ahold of and pull himself up. To give in seemed tantamount to accepting the truth that he really didn't belong anywhere, alien even to himself, but the other road presented meant courting that dark spirit of bloodletting he'd spent so many well-worn years running from. He only knew for certain that he couldn't keep living the way he had been. Slaving away with menial labors. He could feel the cold steel and concrete of the city closing in on him, trapping, shrinking him into a creature hardly alive at all. A lost soul shambling about the alleys homeless and lonesome as a man shipwrecked, as a prisoner of his own mind. The blood was perhaps worth it to avoid that fate, and it was reason enough for him to abandon his employers and follow new ones into dimly lit basements and hidden quarters to beat his neighbor down.
He was shirtless, sweating, and bleeding from his eyebrows when the fight was ended. His opponent was writhing on the floor and his friends, such as they were, were trying to bring him out of an enforced stupor. Bareknuckle. His hands were already swelling and he was nauseous. The echo of the audience still faintly murmured if only in his ears, the whooping and hollering of zealots at a tent revival meeting. There was blood on the hard ground and teeth from where he had drove his fist into the jaw of the other man that lay now in this arms of those who'd dump him at the nearest hospital. He saw the boy nearly dead in the school yard, but there was no missus to keep and protect him this time. He didn't need it. There was only adulation from these congregants, and it broke through a carapace decades-forged of timidity and restraint and caution. His soul was revealed before them fully, and his brutality was applauded and respected rather than condemned. The stack of paper bills he received after was more than he'd ever seen in his life, more than he'd seen traded between even the wealthiest of industrialists in the work fields and factories. He weighed it in his hands and thumbed through the paper and smelled it. Such a frail, arbitrary symbol with which to propel so many things. He knew its power, and wise to understand how addictive and intoxicating it was. The rapacious greed of those wealthy robber barons was as pathological as the chemical dependence of the poor slaves wasting away in the opium dens he passed through. Same disease, different faces. Like a virus adapting to whatever substance or economic bracket it required to infect, destroy, corrupt its host. And how destructive it was. It occurred to him he was now apart of a new system, underhanded and contraband. In this hierarchy he was no one just like before, but there was an upward trajectory that was open and promising. He couldn't sing nor play an instrument nor paint a beautiful portrait. But this, this he could do. Big hands and big wrists. With them he could dismantle another man, could redirect blows and strike with accuracy.
With his fortune rose his reputation and scar tissue across his body. The swelling of the ears and brow and knuckles. He himself was laid out a time or two, waking on a gurney being attended to by some bootleg doctor who cared more about his morphine supply than whether his patient lived or died. This was a den of wolves and vipers and he was one of them now. It was exhausting, and electrifying. Nevermind the money, victory was its own drug. In the ring each and every injustice and disillusion and resentment he focused into a needle point and in his reddened vision his opponent was nothing but a likeness of muscle and bone he needed to tear and bruise and beat. Afterwards he felt as though he'd been in a trance. Staggering from a half-remembered fugue state and weary. He found himself calm outside of the ring, knowing how quickly the trigger could be pulled. When he would seek companionship in the brothel on the way to his quarters they would find him unexpectedly tender and nearly childlike in his awkward accommodation. He would puff on tobacco in the aftermath and the smoke would waft silkily in front of his gold-rimmed spectacles. The wooden crucifix on the bedroom mantle. A man could only take so many blows before he gave out, it was true. His mind would falter and scramble long before his body broke down. There were veterans of the sport known to scarcely be able to remember their own names, and were prone to incomprehensible bouts of fury that would turn like a coin to random sorrow or glee. But it was true also that a man could only deal so many blows. In his soul was a threshold for violence that could be as vast as the Pacific, but eventually its limit would be found, and his humanity would drown in search of it. These were the futures surely in store for him. Maybe a prosperous life, but not one long lived or, at the end, contented.
He walked about the city in fear, the fear of other men. Thieves and swindlers would hesitate before approaching him on the street, the skinny weasels in dirty waistcoats with shifting eyeballs and hidden fingertips murmuring to each other and tracking him as he passed by. Even policemen did little but ignore him, the greatest benefaction from them he could have asked for. But there were others yet who did not share their wisdom. He came upon a corner bar one morning he'd frequented regularly. A double of brandy, his usual sipped slowly and deliberately as he read the paper or commiserated with fellow street denizens. They'd call him Vincent or Wallace or some variation thereof if they thought themselves familiar enough. Those were the names he gave, though they never bore much value to him. They were just letters and vowels someone else had written down, had branded him an appellation that had likely no ties nor records nor genealogies to bear out its meaning. He was a nowhere man still without home or tribe, now he just wore the costume of a somebody. Vincent Wallace, bareknuckle champion of Manhattan Isle. That's what the man called him. He was drunk, sloppily, at nine o'clock by his timepiece. Such a seasoned reprobate to have gone all night and into the adolescent hours of the day still with the ability to stand and speak, at least semi-coherently. He was a man in the throes of loss, anger, heartbreak. So wounded was his pride, bloviating in flop-sweat like an oversized bullfrog. Underneath his mustache were two full, red lips and dribble falling to his upturned shirt collar. He was causing a scene already and soon his encumbered attention turned toward Vincent. Something mumbled about a big bet on a fight, obviously lost, and this winner who was somehow to blame. The bandages on his forehead gave him away. He sat there enduring a spew of open rancor like bile and the spittle from those lips flying toward him, his face. Nobody interfered; this white man could've been somebody and when it came down to it Vincent's presence was more tolerated than accepted. He felt his hand under the table reach for the knife even before his temper began to rise to the point that he could picture clearly the steps of unsheathing it and launching with it first gutting the man and letting all the gallons of his stomach spill out onto the floor. Bloodlust. Like an addict he resisted the urge, his willpower wearing down. And surely it would have, were it not for one who stood up against his assailant. He was white, pale, and thin. In the corner of the pub he had been sitting, watching. A frequent patron of this establishment, at home with the tumbler of liquor and the smoke from his rolled cigarillo abound in his black jacket. He looked a man out of time, born fifty years too late, too late for the lawless western frontier that had already evaporated into cowboy myth. He interjected with an almost careless ease, trying to charm the man as a matador distracts the charging bull. Then he unbuttoned his jacket and brandished the pearlescent grip of his pistol. That got the drunk's attention, and he briskly directed his slovenly ire outside into the streets. The man took his seat back where he came, and his next round was on Vincent. This grinning, calm and collected knave.
Immediately there was a connection between them, some kind of understanding as though they might've known each other early on in their lives and had a shorthand that is only developed between the oldest of friends. Brothers, partners. He didn't know then that within a year he'd be on the road once again with this man his companion. South, towards the border. Hunting people for money, but sanctioned now by the law. A half-step towards purpose, legitimacy, fellowship. Using his natural talents in the pursuit finally of justice, or at least the illusion of it in this sprawling and mad territory. He would feel more fully whole, more like himself than he ever had before. From the traincar window he looked out upon the countryside and studied its face that he knew and loved and felt belonging. The great ocean of possibility open and ripe for the taking, were he adventurous enough to swim out into it. He was, and for the first time in his life, he wasn't alone.
When his mind wandered on the train, his head slouched against the glass and the seat cushion of his bedding, he would ponder how differently his path could've taken. Had he known his father and mother for more than his first four years, if he could now remember their names or faces or the sound of their voices. The old man had purportedly been a Union veteran and one of the only negroes to occupy his own land in the region. Somewhere in Kansas, he was told. He was told also that his mother was half Cheyenne, and though there were no obvious means to prove it he always felt intrinsically that it was true. They gave him up to the orphan house for reasons never specified. He considered it once hopeful to assume they did so against their wills but as he followed that reasoning it became clearer it might not've been a better alternative after all. Where were they now? More than likely dead in the ground, perhaps sparing him in his youth a more vivid understanding of loss and the wounds it creates. The lady of the orphanage was his parent. Mother, and father. She was a hard woman. Her knuckles wide-spread, wrists stocky like a man's. Like his. She was hard but she was fair, in ways he could only comprehend years after. She taught the value of the written word as though it were as lethal as any munition against the inevitable enemies of life. Adversity, injustice. As she taught he felt often she was speaking to him alone, the way she would meet his eyes as she scanned across the classroom. Some strange kinship recognized between them there, unspoken. A bronze crucifix dangling about her cleavage and her dark hair pulled tight above her spectacles. Round and gold-rimmed, not unlike the pair he wore now. He was nearsighted, mildly, but they were worn principally to be a kind of deterrent against those who might be inclined to cause him untoward agitation. In this land it took more than combat prowess and precision of aim to fight well against the wolves and the vultures. It was the strength of the mind that was most paramount. To be smarter than the other guy, more cunning. Cultivating when necessary methods of subterfuge and misdirection. Appearing small, weak, invisible. It came naturally.
Violence had seemed a thing which followed him incessantly and deliberately. A hunting dog loping upon four legs at his scent. He did not cherish it nor call it out to himself but it nonetheless was never too far from catching him regardless of how far and how deep he hid. The first fight was sudden and stark like a lightning strike against the side of his face. He tumbled to the grass from the stump he was sitting on and the child who struck stood over him and reeled back his fist again and he took two more of his blows before he procured a grip on his ankle and wrenched him down and throttled him with both hands until his eyes lolled up and back into his head and his tongue stuck out. He could've killed him. It was an instant realization and the gasps on the faces of the onlookers said they shared in it. Bewildered spectators gawking at the pit spectacle. In the middle of their surrounding surged through him vindication and he was terrified of it. That intoxicating, exhilarating sensation of having dominion over a lesser creature. What the hawk might feel when its talons sink into the rabbit. Not one of them interfered save her, the missus. She took him by the ear crying and locked him in her office while she tended to the other boy. He bawled like the child he was, all of eight years old. Were it not for her he could've faced some terrible ends that day. People, his people, had been strung up for less, even as young as he was. She told him the tears were good. She said they would see them, the neighbors and the parents, and they would take pity on him. He would employ that tactic skillfully, but once he got older it would lose its advantage, once the raw fibrous chords of his emotions were buried under layers of callous truculence and muscle definition.
He had taken up work in Arkansas when the whispers of war began to matriculate amongst common hired hands and farm workers. There was some inclination in him even then that he'd be caught in its global tumult, like a great storm he could see in the far horizon growing and lurching inevitably toward him. That spirit of violence itself amassing power. Hibernating, one might say, in its relative absence. He'd seen glimpses of its face here and there in the eyes of rankled drunkards and scorned lovers. Slurred speech and hatred boiling red over on their cheeks. But it hadn't come to his doorstep; he'd fixed a posture against it, migrating to avoid its wrath. Wandering of his late teens running into adulthood, if such a thing could be given stringent parameters. It was as though it was setting the perfect trap for him, its prey, and in that year nineteen-seventeen, he was taken by the draft and conscripted in the fight against the Kaiser and his soldiers. The great war, they called it. The war to end all wars. What myopic arrogance it was. Any measure of sympathy to the cause he harbored was a meager, flaccid hope that like a pilot light extinguished completely when he laid his bespectacled vision upon the utterly excoriated passage of Belgium referred to as the Western Front. A hellish portrait more abhorrent than any Sunday school lesson could describe. Men whose flesh peeled off their feet from months of wading in mud and rivers of excrement. A moist, rancid, pale leprosy. Epidemics of fever and gangrene and parasites carried by trench rats more insidious a threat than German artillery. Gutter life. The freshest crop of the country's best and brightest dumped by the boatfull into holes in the ground half a world away with the refuse atop the dead and the dying. There was near his position a corpse visible above the rim of the trench that had been tangled up in barbed wire and ventilated through by machine gun fire. Over days and weeks he watched the body hang and soak in constant rainfall. Several of his unit took bets on how long it would take for it to finally fall, if it would. No one could quite recall who he was, or even which side to whom he belonged. It seemed not to matter one way or the other. Dead was dead, and this place was submerged in it. Mounds of horseflesh stinking half-hidden in the lingering fog of gunpowder and mustard gas intermixed with their scalloped riders. On one side of the field the antique vestiges of the old world threw themselves against the wall of mechanized warfare, becoming obsolete in a single charge.
Over there he saw a new world roll over the one he previously knew. A world in its beginning perhaps; no, more like an evolution, like the monarch bursting out from the husk of its former self. He really shouldn't have been surprised, he would think later. But even his cynicism, well tempered as it was, was found lacking, unable to brace against such a realized horror. He could see reverberations of it in the stare of some of the boys, the redness around the eyelids and the vacancy in their pupils. Some kind of injury of the soul, undiagnosable. Why he wasn't affected the same he could only wonder. It was a strange feeling of inadequacy, being among the downtrodden veterans in the tenement building he occupied. Scullery fires in trash barrels under bridges and byways. Sharing tobacco and hobo cuisine with the dirty and trembling whom he trusted just enough to not gut him. Sheathed at the small of his back was the trench knife he had carried from France all the way there. Just in case, always. In the long suitcase he walked with from the train station there was a scopeless Springfield rifle, disassembled, and a Colt 1911 pistol with no ammunition to speak of. They were gifts courtesy of the United States government, so to speak. And valuable gifts they were, though he was reticent to trade them, even when he found himself hungry and cold in this contemptuous city. In his little hovel up five flights of stairs, cohabiting with rats the size of small canines. Familiar, this. Not the Edenic land of promise he allowed himself to believe it was. Often he returned in his thoughts to the grass sea of Kansas, to retrace antecedent footsteps and make better of them this time.
Work was scarce, and indignant. They were jobs endured rather than embraced from taciturn taskmasters who treated him as a thing only a little more sophisticated than a beast of burden. White men who dealt in epithets with nearly every breath that passed from their lips; words like monkey, coon, nigger spitting in his direction with an indifference somehow worse than the deliberate, fervent hatred. Those who had lived in their prejudice so long and so well it manifested on their bodies like gout, like arthritic limps. This city was not some fantasy land and there were none he could find enlightened anymore than there had been in other province of the country. He loaded trucks and trains, their engines puttering temptations for his escape. His arms, shoulders, back grew stronger and they drew the attention of ringmasters who thought they saw profit in his experience with combat. They came as pied pipers spinning honeyed tales of riches and autonomous living and once again he found himself at a crossroad. He could run, just like he had so many times before, but to do so would be admitting defeat. He hadn't wandered so far to turn back; there had to be some treasure hidden in this labyrinth, some peace of mind there to grab ahold of and pull himself up. To give in seemed tantamount to accepting the truth that he really didn't belong anywhere, alien even to himself, but the other road presented meant courting that dark spirit of bloodletting he'd spent so many well-worn years running from. He only knew for certain that he couldn't keep living the way he had been. Slaving away with menial labors. He could feel the cold steel and concrete of the city closing in on him, trapping, shrinking him into a creature hardly alive at all. A lost soul shambling about the alleys homeless and lonesome as a man shipwrecked, as a prisoner of his own mind. The blood was perhaps worth it to avoid that fate, and it was reason enough for him to abandon his employers and follow new ones into dimly lit basements and hidden quarters to beat his neighbor down.
He was shirtless, sweating, and bleeding from his eyebrows when the fight was ended. His opponent was writhing on the floor and his friends, such as they were, were trying to bring him out of an enforced stupor. Bareknuckle. His hands were already swelling and he was nauseous. The echo of the audience still faintly murmured if only in his ears, the whooping and hollering of zealots at a tent revival meeting. There was blood on the hard ground and teeth from where he had drove his fist into the jaw of the other man that lay now in this arms of those who'd dump him at the nearest hospital. He saw the boy nearly dead in the school yard, but there was no missus to keep and protect him this time. He didn't need it. There was only adulation from these congregants, and it broke through a carapace decades-forged of timidity and restraint and caution. His soul was revealed before them fully, and his brutality was applauded and respected rather than condemned. The stack of paper bills he received after was more than he'd ever seen in his life, more than he'd seen traded between even the wealthiest of industrialists in the work fields and factories. He weighed it in his hands and thumbed through the paper and smelled it. Such a frail, arbitrary symbol with which to propel so many things. He knew its power, and wise to understand how addictive and intoxicating it was. The rapacious greed of those wealthy robber barons was as pathological as the chemical dependence of the poor slaves wasting away in the opium dens he passed through. Same disease, different faces. Like a virus adapting to whatever substance or economic bracket it required to infect, destroy, corrupt its host. And how destructive it was. It occurred to him he was now apart of a new system, underhanded and contraband. In this hierarchy he was no one just like before, but there was an upward trajectory that was open and promising. He couldn't sing nor play an instrument nor paint a beautiful portrait. But this, this he could do. Big hands and big wrists. With them he could dismantle another man, could redirect blows and strike with accuracy.
With his fortune rose his reputation and scar tissue across his body. The swelling of the ears and brow and knuckles. He himself was laid out a time or two, waking on a gurney being attended to by some bootleg doctor who cared more about his morphine supply than whether his patient lived or died. This was a den of wolves and vipers and he was one of them now. It was exhausting, and electrifying. Nevermind the money, victory was its own drug. In the ring each and every injustice and disillusion and resentment he focused into a needle point and in his reddened vision his opponent was nothing but a likeness of muscle and bone he needed to tear and bruise and beat. Afterwards he felt as though he'd been in a trance. Staggering from a half-remembered fugue state and weary. He found himself calm outside of the ring, knowing how quickly the trigger could be pulled. When he would seek companionship in the brothel on the way to his quarters they would find him unexpectedly tender and nearly childlike in his awkward accommodation. He would puff on tobacco in the aftermath and the smoke would waft silkily in front of his gold-rimmed spectacles. The wooden crucifix on the bedroom mantle. A man could only take so many blows before he gave out, it was true. His mind would falter and scramble long before his body broke down. There were veterans of the sport known to scarcely be able to remember their own names, and were prone to incomprehensible bouts of fury that would turn like a coin to random sorrow or glee. But it was true also that a man could only deal so many blows. In his soul was a threshold for violence that could be as vast as the Pacific, but eventually its limit would be found, and his humanity would drown in search of it. These were the futures surely in store for him. Maybe a prosperous life, but not one long lived or, at the end, contented.
He walked about the city in fear, the fear of other men. Thieves and swindlers would hesitate before approaching him on the street, the skinny weasels in dirty waistcoats with shifting eyeballs and hidden fingertips murmuring to each other and tracking him as he passed by. Even policemen did little but ignore him, the greatest benefaction from them he could have asked for. But there were others yet who did not share their wisdom. He came upon a corner bar one morning he'd frequented regularly. A double of brandy, his usual sipped slowly and deliberately as he read the paper or commiserated with fellow street denizens. They'd call him Vincent or Wallace or some variation thereof if they thought themselves familiar enough. Those were the names he gave, though they never bore much value to him. They were just letters and vowels someone else had written down, had branded him an appellation that had likely no ties nor records nor genealogies to bear out its meaning. He was a nowhere man still without home or tribe, now he just wore the costume of a somebody. Vincent Wallace, bareknuckle champion of Manhattan Isle. That's what the man called him. He was drunk, sloppily, at nine o'clock by his timepiece. Such a seasoned reprobate to have gone all night and into the adolescent hours of the day still with the ability to stand and speak, at least semi-coherently. He was a man in the throes of loss, anger, heartbreak. So wounded was his pride, bloviating in flop-sweat like an oversized bullfrog. Underneath his mustache were two full, red lips and dribble falling to his upturned shirt collar. He was causing a scene already and soon his encumbered attention turned toward Vincent. Something mumbled about a big bet on a fight, obviously lost, and this winner who was somehow to blame. The bandages on his forehead gave him away. He sat there enduring a spew of open rancor like bile and the spittle from those lips flying toward him, his face. Nobody interfered; this white man could've been somebody and when it came down to it Vincent's presence was more tolerated than accepted. He felt his hand under the table reach for the knife even before his temper began to rise to the point that he could picture clearly the steps of unsheathing it and launching with it first gutting the man and letting all the gallons of his stomach spill out onto the floor. Bloodlust. Like an addict he resisted the urge, his willpower wearing down. And surely it would have, were it not for one who stood up against his assailant. He was white, pale, and thin. In the corner of the pub he had been sitting, watching. A frequent patron of this establishment, at home with the tumbler of liquor and the smoke from his rolled cigarillo abound in his black jacket. He looked a man out of time, born fifty years too late, too late for the lawless western frontier that had already evaporated into cowboy myth. He interjected with an almost careless ease, trying to charm the man as a matador distracts the charging bull. Then he unbuttoned his jacket and brandished the pearlescent grip of his pistol. That got the drunk's attention, and he briskly directed his slovenly ire outside into the streets. The man took his seat back where he came, and his next round was on Vincent. This grinning, calm and collected knave.
Immediately there was a connection between them, some kind of understanding as though they might've known each other early on in their lives and had a shorthand that is only developed between the oldest of friends. Brothers, partners. He didn't know then that within a year he'd be on the road once again with this man his companion. South, towards the border. Hunting people for money, but sanctioned now by the law. A half-step towards purpose, legitimacy, fellowship. Using his natural talents in the pursuit finally of justice, or at least the illusion of it in this sprawling and mad territory. He would feel more fully whole, more like himself than he ever had before. From the traincar window he looked out upon the countryside and studied its face that he knew and loved and felt belonging. The great ocean of possibility open and ripe for the taking, were he adventurous enough to swim out into it. He was, and for the first time in his life, he wasn't alone.
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