Gun Mantra

05/09/11

I walk down the stone pier. It’s slick with slime and excrement and littered with ash. Dark water slaps against pylons. I look over the river. Even at this hour, it lives. Thick with the poor and powerful. The citizen and the criminal. Lost in lantern light and darkness. Choking curls of pyre smoke.

Behind me the radio. Chota chatters. The walkie-talkie chirps back. He touches my shoulder. Before he speaks I know what he is going to say. “Inspector, Rajan is leaving the char.”

I look out at that island. An ephemeral home of silt and sediment. When the rains come next month, it will vanish. Washed away. Further down river to form anew. Now it teams with refugees and hardscrabble hovels. Poverty is the mother of all crime. It births thieves from its shriveled and malnourished cunt.
Vijay Rajan knows this. He uses it.

No more after tonight.

“Let’s go. Positions.” Chota barks my command. It spreads like funeral fire along the bank. It cascades through radio and cell.

The Encounter Squad waits.

It seems forever. But lasts for only a breath before engine hum overtakes the silence. The boat. Moving. Toward us. Cutting holy water with a liar’s ease.

I unclip my holster. Close my eyes. Still my breath. My men won’t understand this. They are good men. But they won’t. They never do.

The bow thuds against the pier. I open my eyes. In the dim I see Rajan riding aft. High-seated and smug like one of the bandit kings the Raj hung from crossroad trees. The lead men hops from boat to stone, grips rope and pulls his master home.

My men will be there for the trial and the ruling. Justifiable. Duty served. They’ll pat me on the back. Call me cowboy. Buy me drinks next time we meet. They’ll tell stories of my daring in desperate bids to bed call-center honeys.

But they won’t understand.

I look down at my right hand. At the tattoo of Lord Ganesha. Remover of Obstacles. I flex and draw my weapon, adjust grip. Its feels damning. Not the action I know will come, but this movement, this moment. Like I’ve repeated it before, across thousands of lives. I feel the tug of the thousand more to come and fear it will always be this. Me and a gun.

Rajan stands. Buttons his jacket. He moves down the length of the boat, steadied by the hands of his men. Passed like some relic. I give no word, I only move. Out of the darkness and quick down the pier.

“Gun,” I yell and shoot the lead man in the skull. It shatters like the universe before Shiva. It knocks him backward off the pier. His body careens into the boat with a wet smack before the water swallows it.

The Encounter Squad moves. Voices cry out. In the night and the smoke. Directionless and thrown into echo. Guns glint and gleam. More cocks than a brothel could service. So many men. Footsteps are thunder. The storm of elephants. Panic rises in eyes.

When the heavens move, man must relent or be swept aside by the tide of time.

Again, I yell, “Gun!” This shot spears the throat of the motor man. His death spasm fires the engine. The boat jerks, bangs into the pylons, cuts sharply backward only to be yanked and spin on the mooring.
From my left, machinegun fire cuts the boat to splinters.

Rajan straightens. The squad positions and aims. A righteous army. His eyes remained motionless. Yet, I hope in this moment, he understands our life and our death.

“Fuck you, Inspector.”

He doesn’t.

“Vijay Rajan,” I tell him, “you are under arrest.”

He shrugs.

I raise my weapon. He stares at the barrel of the gun. “Is this what karma looks like?” He asks.

Ganesha’s inky trunk tightens. The bullet penetrates his suprasternal notch. Ganesha roars again. The second punches through the bottom of his chin. Exits in vivid spray from the top of his head.

I tell my men to wait before fishing him from the Ganges. First, it must wash him clean.

~ fin ~

Chad Eagleton is the Spinetingler Nominated author of “Ghostman On Third.” Fans and stalkers can find him at http://cathodeangel.blogspot.com/ or http://www.facebook.com/eagleton .

Protect and serve. Justice can be delivered in many forms. Excellent piece. Very vivid images. Feels like you're there on the sidelines watching it all unfold.
Joyce Juzwik
June 10, 2011
Great work, Chad. Tight writing with some great imagery. A lot told in such a short piece. Well done.

As Matt said, a real gem!
David Barber
May 10, 2011
Beautiful and intriguing on many levels - cultural, mystic, literary. You accomplish some adventures of form and diction that manage to bring back lovely artifacts. There are pieces here that linger both in their description and in the distinct way, chiseled or flowing, they are described.

All that on top of the exotic flavor of New Delhi Noir, and I find this a real gem.
M. C. Funk
May 10, 2011
You're a gunslinger poet. A lot of people can craft memorable images, but yours were perfect for a jaded operator in India. Great work.
Thomas Pluck
May 09, 2011
Out'ta the park, Chad. You put me neck deep in the action from the jump but, like good whiskey, never let me lose my place. Plus a nifty set of flash descriptions and feel for India to boot. And like good whiskey, left me wanting to ride with that cowboy again. Make a nice series character, he would.
ajhayes2
May 09, 2011
Word economy and tight sentences. Well done.
Christopher Pimental
May 09, 2011
Woah! Exceptionally strong images. Splendid.
Paul D. Brazill
May 09, 2011

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