Other than that, he awaits the occasion. And now, it’s here…
To Mack’s left, John Smith rises up the path like a bug swarm of old-time TV static. His gray-suited image grows clearer to Mack as he continues growing up the path and drawing nearer. Summitting the hilltop, Smith takes a single step forward from the path’s edge toward Mack and halts; nor does Mack move toward Smith, preferring to keep the cross between them.
Two beefy men emerge from the path to Mack’s right.
“Setting your dopes on me, Smith?”
Smith removes his fedora and slowly steers its rim through both hands’ fingers, while looking down at his feet, as though his middle name were Modesty. His muscle feel Mack up and down and all over.
“He’s clean…”
“Hey, Smith, you need to hire some better talent. Your two queer boys here missed my left nut, which is bigger, and hangs a lot lower than my right one…”
Smith replaces the fedora on his head and looks up at Mack; Smith’s two thugs turn and slide back down the hill.
“Taking care of the green ledger, Mack? How’s that freak kid of yours? Grown up some by now, I bet. And his mom, the dancing whore – how’s she?”
“I should have left you in that ridiculous peacoat, Smith, together with your delusional fantasies of being some rock-jawed stevedore having fistfights on the docks at four in the morning, and then heading to the pub for a melted cheddar, bacon, and egg sandwich with black coffee and rye. But no, I just had to pick you up and give you a crack at that rookie post in the agency. I admit, I probably went a little overboard. I probably should have just left you alone. I mean, at the agency, when you were already with the rest of us. I don’t regret hiring you, not one bit. To this day, I feel I did exactly the right thing. But I guess it was everything that followed, it was, well, anyway… I probably should have just left you alone, to work out your differences with Step, Dickerson, some of the others, on your own. That would have probably been the best thing. But, in the end, I just don’t know.”
“I had a father, Mack – I didn’t need you to try to be one for me. Look where it got us.”
“Yeah, Smith… yeah… you’re right. But there you have it. Looks like that ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ you carried around with you for a while didn’t help much. So, where do we take it from here?”
A rook alights on the cross, choosing the extreme left of the crossbeam; the side closer to Smith.
“A friend of yours, Smith?”
“I guess you can say we’re somewhat acquainted…”
A palpable flutter of wing, as if the bird is flattered, but no other sound from the rook.
A little boy, maybe five, six, but no more than seven years old, appears from off the path and now stands next to Smith. He’s dressed like Aladdin, from the top of his turbaned head to the tips of his toe-curled slippers, and has just about the blackest face that Mack has ever seen. Black as pitch; black, like coal.
The little boy looks up beseechingly at Smith and tugs at his jacket flap, and now he speaks to Smith in some rapid, cockamamie high-voiced gibberish with an urgency and a despair that Smith, in his physical response to the boy, purports to understand. The boy chatters non-stop at Smith in bizarre modulations, tones, and patterns, and the high-pitched wall of sound the boy produces appears to move Smith to compassion, almost to tears.
The boy reaches up his little black hand to Smith, and Smith brings his down to meet the boy’s.
‘Is this some kind of degenerate theater? And is that… actually a midget… actor… in blackface?’
Hand-in-hand, Smith and the little black boy, or midget actor, turn their backs to Mack and walk, slowly, carefully, even tenderly and gently, back down the hill.
And now Mack’s all alone on the hill, with only the rook atop the cross next to him, and Mack feels, knows, if he begins moving back toward the metal stairs, he will die.
The rook picks up a relentless ruckus and cawing, hopping up and down on the beam and flapping and beating and thrashing its wings, and cawing and crying and cawing, and Mack is frozen-scared in place, his left hand touching, grabbing the cross.
A shot rings out, and Mack, his legs giving under, falls back on his ass, just as the dead body of the rook hits the hilltop ground with a thud but a few feet from him on the other side of the cross.
A few seconds later, a hand reaches down to help Mack up.
“Morne! Where did you come from? I slipped.”
“I know you did, Mack. Saw the whole thing. That fuckin’ bird was meant to drown out any noise of those two thugs coming back up to kill you. When I shot the bird, they skedaddled. Back down the hill, that is. Only stands to reason.”
“Yeah… yeah… that’s all right. I tagged one of them when he was feeling me up. Hold it, Morne – before we get going…”
Mack steps over to the corpse of the rook and kicks it, like and American football, over the edge of the hill.
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always–
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. *
* We take the verses from “Four Quartets” without permission, and want to know: What is the estate of T.S. Eliot going to do about it? Your Friends on the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board, working hard for you…
Filed by Ed Tomorrow, October 1, 2025