Who Art Worthy

*Content warning for racism and misogyny and implied sexual violence*

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“[call] Well who's that writin'? 

[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson

Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.

And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had brought down many animals for food and skins, cruelty was not an indulgence to ever tempt him.

He played fair, though he played hard.

On the road behind, he’d ditched his ride, an eighties Mercury passed down from his long-dead father and driven into oblivion. Transmission now gutted like a rattler shedding its spine. Last song fading on his halfbusted radio Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel and ice “John the Revelator.” He’d walked a good fifteen highway miles since, that old blues song conferring inside him like a memory of dread, until this inconvenience store hove into view above the prairie buffalograss and patched asphalt.

He nodded at the clerk behind the counter, a dark-skinned young woman who had barely cleared her teens. The bell like a harbinger still echoed in the otherwise empty store. Her return nod was almost imperceptible, but he perceived it all the same. Along with some inkling of distant kinship.

Three men came in like envoys of chaos while Latrant stood contemplating snacks. He knew immediately their number by their disparate voices—the touchpaper toll of one used to deference, the flinty cringe of his sidekick, and the wavering, sexless pitch of a witless powder keg—and that they would need to be defused. 

Cold electricity ran in quick pulses along his skin, and he slowed his heart and breathing, let his knees sag, and enshadowed himself in the narrow aisle, eyes fixed on the convex mirror up front in the corner.

One of the men, the leader, said, “Check the aisles.” 

The sidekicks wouldn’t see Latrant; practice and blood ties had bestowed upon him uncanny stealth.

In the terrain map of his head, he assigned names to their voices, to their essences. Groan: the short bald leader whose cockiness belied his meager talents. Muskrat: needy watery-eyed enabler. Deejay: soft of mind and body but endlessly cruel.

“Well, fellas, seems we lucked out,” the one named Muskrat said upon spotting the clerk. “So which are you, honey, a dirty illegal or a filthy squaw?”

The woman didn’t make eye contact or reply and stared only at the counter. Latrant watched the mirror in silence.

Deejay’s interest was piqued. “Answer my friend, cunt.”

“Hey, hey, come now, my brothers,” said Groan, all false bonhomie. “We come in good faith and only wanna rob the place and not cause unnecessary pain. But first, would you be so kind as to indulge my rude but curious friends and divulge your ancestry, princess?”

She whispered a word—“Nuwuvi”—that Latrant knew meant Southern Paiute.

“Speak up. And speak American,” said Deejay, the pale rindlike orifice on his dusty ocher face tightening in a strange moue. 

Muskrat laughed but Groan didn’t.

“Paiute,” she said more clearly.

“Don’t sound too American to me,” said Muskrat.

“Shut up,” said Groan. “Pocahontas ain’t American either, but at least we know she ain’t no beaner. Might even earn her a stay. Up to a point, anyways.”

Deejay perked up at this. “So once we git the cash, we git to have some fun?”

“Sure. Violate but don’t mutilate. Not this one. I almost like her.” He stared at her, not blinking. She didn’t look away. “Hand over the contents of that cash drawer, missy. Then come around this side of the counter. Hands where I can see ’em.”

Latrant knew the men had to be armed, yet they hadn’t so much as given her a glimpse of barrel or blade, such was their hubris, for which they’d pay.

“It’s your lucky day, girl.” Groan’s genial demeanor dropped away. “Gonna taste you some white meat at last. And since we’re probably gonna let you live, you can tell your fellow savages how you done fucked some real men on this blessed day of our good lord.”

Listening and watching, Latrant thought how each of these men had a void in his head that clashed and clamored like a ceaseless howl. Each an echoing vacancy, self-loathing disguised as righteous entitlement. Mediocrity cosplaying masculinity. He wondered how such creatures were made. What dark unruly compensations vied inside their quaking substrata.

The woman did as she was told, passing a wad of bills and moving slowly, hands raised. Latrant was not often impressed by people, but he was impressed by her; she knew beyond a shadow he was here in the store, but not once had she flicked her glance in his direction or otherwise risked his detection.

Any exchange of words would give them the advantage, so he decided on action only. And once he’d decided on action, it would happen with swift brutality.

Groan had his back to him, and Latrant would have taken him first regardless. Stepping from the shadows, he grabbed the man’s slippery forehead and pulled back while simultaneously using great force to draw his nine-inch Bowie knife across and deep into his neck, feeling the tendons and vessels part, the trachea and esophagus rupture, the volcanic heat of the blood spout. All this before the other two had barely registered it. The woman noticed, though, and reached behind the counter and produced a classic wooden Louisville Slugger and cracked Deejay across the temple while Latrant let his victim fall and first circled then stutter-stabbed the wide-eyed, slackjawed Muskrat in a quick frenzy of kidney punctures, pirouetting him for the coup de grâce, a merciful upthrust below his sternum and into his tiny shriveled heart. Latrant stood back and let the woman finish her work on Deejay, the bat scoring home run after home run on his uncomprehending boxlike head until it lay in globs of quivering viscera, bone, and the negligible cupful of brains it had once contained.

Latrant grabbed a set of keys from one of the men’s belt loops and turned to the woman, his hand outstretched.

“The bat. Call the authorities in fifteen minutes. Come up with a plausible story that won’t implicate you. I know it was self-defense, but, they were white and… well, you know the rest. Invent a description for me and the truck I’m taking. Put it all on them. And me. I was never here, but a ghost was.” He paused and they kept eye contact. “You did good.”

“You did too.” 

Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the set of keys and recognized that the old Ford pickup resting forlorn in the dust of the parking lot like an old man awaiting gentle death would be his home now indefinitely and he drove onto the highway unremarked and diminutive, centered within the immense and shifting wheel of the encompassing horizon.

The many unnumbered, those who seem to matter not, might prove to be our ransom, the price paid to balance the ledger.

“[call] Tell me what's John writin'? 

[response] Ask the Revelator.”

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Image © Krystle Wright