Nacho

There was a knock at the door, and I thought to myself, “It’s a beast.” I thought that because I was on acid. Acid was readily available when meth was not. The beast at the door was bearded and wild, stocky like Frankenstein’s younger treacherous brother. He was known to kill cattle at night with a pitch fork and howl at the moon. I personally saw him eat the warm heart of a calf cut fresh from the womb. There was a nagging madness about him and you could see it in his eyes. It freed him. And because of his freedom he was feared, for he knew no fear himself, even when confronted naked by an ork sword in singular darkness of an avocado orchard by a redneck maniac named Manny Williams.

“What do you want?” I screamed looking into the abyss he called his eyes.

He answered quietly like a humble Hulk, “Can I pitch a tent down by the creek for a while.” There was murder in his tone.

“Sure, man… yonder past the shrubs is a good stand of oak you can camp in.”

“Thanks,” he said.

When he walked off into the night, disappearing like a clandestine apparition, something cold and weary, skulking off into the depths like the incorporeal vision of man, I hoped for the best, knowing the worst. He’d told me what he’d do to that man if he ever came back and tried to put his “momma out on her ass.” I feared a good while that that day would come. And by all accounts it had.

The acid rolled over me like waves in a frantic ocean, a painful tide, swelling like God’s umbilical cord unraveled and split to bear. Moon devils danced like lithium breakers on sandstone pillars in acrid typhoon weather – and not a soul was shook free. Lest be the damned. And the world shook with the power of a trillion neutron bombs at the dark center of the molten earth – and the holy light spilt forth with a passion of a million love struck women condemned to spend eternity with a handsome boy, clever of eye, curled and striking, like David standing ten foot tall, untouchable. All of this while the music played. And the stars danced and changed colors in the sky.

Next morning I woke up and drug myself to the General Store. There was word there of malice on the mountain. A man is dead. And he is a tax collector, say some, a vagrant, say others, and still others say the man dead was a man from the bank, come to take a man’s home away from him. I heard the name of the man they all say done it. The man that banker come to appropriate.

“Nacho’s, yeah… that’s where it happened, up at his house. Last I seen him he say he gonna shoot the bastard that fuck with his mamma’s home – she been payin’ on that thing twenty years and then they just come on out of the bricks and mortar and take it back like she ain’t got no right to it, like they ain’t been payin’ all these years, and it don’t make no fucking sense, there ought be a law against shit like that, goddamn, it’s un-American…” and the sympathies went on.

There was a definite conformity of reason amongst the patrons of the market that even if Nacho had done it, it was probably for good reason and for the best anyway. This, however, did not deter them from coming to a second accord, which was rare amongst this crowd who seldom agreed on anything besides a dislike for authority, on the fact that the murder had been particularly gruesome. It turns out that the bank man got his by way of an arrow shot from the hallow darkness of a small tin shed. This, nonetheless, did not kill him. The butcher then took the wounded man back into the chaparral where he cut off his toes first, and then his hands, all of which he cauterized with a cast iron pan. Then he skinned the man’s legs, cauterizing always as he went, and when his bank man passed out from pain and horror Nacho waited, and kept him alive, fed him water and vitamins, and then when he returned to consciousness Nacho would start again, prying off the skin with pliers and a razor blade he kept close to his bloodied reach. After Nacho was done with the body he left it there in the sand to be found by turkey vultures and then a wondering hunter, and left.

Nacho knew the man in his yard wasn’t the Man responsible, at least not personally, but he represented an evil far greater than himself and had to be destroyed, if for no other reason than to be an example, “You can’t just fuck people forever,” he said once, disappearing into the night.

The next time I saw Nacho he was coming out of the brush, out of the stand of oaks down by the creek. I hadn’t said a word to the Man. I was cooking steak instead, eye singed by the glare of the morning sun. I asked him if he wanted something to eat and he said he would and sat down heavily, broad shoulders tight underneath the loose black T-shirt. I had a small cooler at my feet. It was red and I had ice and beer in it. I got one out and opened it.

“You want a beer?” I asked, reaching.

“I don’t drink,” he said.

“How ‘bout a tab of acid?”

He shook his head, No.


previously published in Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review
By: Dillon Mullenix