A redemption story.

"Roeland was een krijger, uit het land van de midnachtzon,
hij had een Thompsongun te leen, een zwaar en bruut kanon."
Warren Zevon - Roland the headless Thompson gunner

I petted my revolver and looked towards the flapping doors of the saloon. Inside, everybody was silent. Their catatonia was unexpected and sudden, as if they all had fallen into the same dreamless sleep together.

I looked through the window but there was nothing outside. Nothing but dust and sand and some horses. In the vast desolate landscape there was no movement. I could feel the beating of my heart in my throat. Every each minutes a painful pang went from my head through my body until it reached the utter extremities of my limbs. “I must be really nervous. Calm down old boy”, I tried to soothe myself. The silence of the horses outside struck me as odd, but I tried to pay no attention to it. It started getting cold.

“Is everybody looking at me?”, I wondered. Maybe they were, because I was about to embark on a great and perilous adventure. I was going to kill Gangbang Bronco, the meanest brute ever to cross these plains.

I had been chasing Bronco for the entire summer, riding through dust ridden towns and dark and cold deserts. I slept in saloons filled with gamblers, whoremongers and pimpstars. For all the scum I encountered, I knew of none that were as bad as Bronco. Nor as vicious.

The scumbags all told stories about Bronco. About how mean and big he was. About how he always carried a Louisville slugger, his Smith and Wesson Gun and a big old hunting knife. They said he liked to stroke the knife and that he even had given it a name. “Is it Susan?”, I laughingly asked the old miner who had told me the story.

He squeezed one eye shut. “Whadyamean?”, he asked me. I just shrugged. “Never mind”, I said. There was no room for drollery in the places I frequented.

They also frequently told the tale about how Gangbang Bronco got his nickname. Even though he was a bank robber and a thieving murderer, professionally, he had an even greater passion. Bronco liked to rape women.

“You can take that to be quite literal, young one”, a particularly pathetic boozehound told me one night in exchange for some company and some shots of whiskey. “He won’t just rape one woman at a time. He likes them at the dozen. He just ties them up together, puts their asses up in the air and fucks the hell out of them. One at a time. Really slow.” He laughed, speaking this filth, and I felt like shooting him or telling him how I felt in a quite straightforward fashion. But I held my peace, and said nothing, even though his sadism disgusted me. I was a man on a mission. I only wanted to kill Bronco. All the other scum in the world might as well had gone to heaven to eat pudding from silver spoons forever. I really didn’t care. There was no morality in my actions, only vengeance. Hatred tore me apart.

I also didn’t tell the old alcoholic that I already knew why and how Gangbang Bronco had gotten his atrocious nickname. I didn’t tell him that Bronco had come to our farm one night and that he had spread his infamy on my family.

It was near the end of April, the merriest of times. The sun shone continually and as we got out of the house every morning we were filled with the realization that the long dark winter was finally over. We had heard rumors about a gang of outlaws that frequented the neighboring towns, but we didn’t really worry. There was always some danger, be it a pack of wolves, some outlaws or veteran soldiers or just taxes.

We really didn’t bother to think about it, just happy to be living on our secluded farm.

Well, maybe I’m making too much of an utopia of our farm back then, there might have been hard times. My daddy wasn’t always an easygoing man and he and momma fought a lot. But I still think of my childhood in that place with fondness. But there’s no wonder I don’t recall the relative misery of the past, considering what happened that one night in sunny April.

As I woke up in the middle of the night, there was a violent noise that seemed to be originating in the kitchen. It sounded as if somebody was violently turning all of the furniture upsidedown. I heard a woman screaming. I recognized the voice as my sister’s. I put on my pants and I rushed out of bed.

There was a large bearded fellow in the kitchen. He wore a faded dustbuster and a black torn cowboyhat. But I could immediately tell he was not a cowboy. His peering eyes looked straight at me. He held my sister by the throat with one hand and a big hunting knife with the other one. The kitchen was a mess. He really had turned all the furniture around. I thought he probably had been looking for money, but we had nothing of value in the house. He must have divined what I was thinking because a big grin appeared on his face.

“I’ll just take this, then”, he said and he looked at my sister. He grabbed her crotch with his free hand and made a ticklish motion with his fingers. But she tried to kick him in the groin. He saw the attack coming, threw her on the ground and kicked her in the head with his boot. She shrunk on the wooden floor boards, reduced to a groaning puddle of misery. He moved towards me. My instinct told me to flee, or at least to fight back, but I couldn’t move. Perhaps it was cowardice, perhaps it was just a natural impulse because of the shock. He stood right in front of me. I could almost feel him breathing.

“You should go take a look in the bedroom later on”, he sneered. He petted me on the head, like you would do with a dog or a cat, after which he violently punched me in the face. I doubled over and slapped to the floor. I hit the ground with the back of my head first. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling of our house. I had a trivial thought about the lumber work. “Looks solid”, I thought and I lost consciousness.

When I came to I was very cold. The light of morning was already shining through the window panes and the ruins of our kitchen bathed in the golden light. I rubbed my head and wondered where I was for a moment, but quickly recalled what had come to pass the night before. I also remembered the last words he spoke to me. I knew that whatever I was going to find in the bedroom would be horrible but I had to go. A force within me compelled me to take a look at what once were my parents. So I did.

Afterwards I sat in the kitchen for a long time, staring at the wall. My sister was nowhere to be found, not in- or outside. “That monster must have taken her”, I thought. I felt like putting a bullet through my head.

Around noon I left the house and went to the village. I alerted the sheriff. He responded promptly and our house quite quickly became the scene of an investigation, of sorts. Men were walking around talking bloody murder. They didn't strike me as very efficient and I got the feeling none of them really knew what he was doing.

The sheriff asked me to tell my story and I did, several times. I asked him if I could bury my parents, but he told me we would arrange these things later. They took the bodies and rolled them away in a wooden cart. In the end the sheriff petted me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to spend the night at his place. I told him I’d rather sleep at home. He said he was going to put one of his men outside, so I needn’t worry.

“We’ll find your sister”, he told me. But I knew she’d already died, I felt it somehow. Quite the visionary, I was.

The evening came and I went to bed alone. The fear I had felt had disappeared from my body and I felt utterly alone. I had also became angry. A strong feeling of rage I had never felt before overwhelmed me. I went outside, to the back of the house, and looked at the moon. As my eyes filled themselves with tears of rage I screamed at the moon.

"Damn his blood, damn everyone and everything he has ever loved",I thought.

The next day the sheriff came to my house and told me they had found the body of my sister. “He stripped all the clothes of her body and there were bruises on her face and all over her body. We believe that she was raped several times, though she has to be examined to be sure.” He asked me if I wanted to see her but I told him I didn't. "That's alright son", he said. He handed me a form to sign, which I did and then he left. “You take care now”, was all he said as he shook my hand. I thought he could’ve been more tactful but still he was the last decent human being I talked to.

I saddled my horse, loaded my father’s Colt, his much prided on Army Model, and put it in my belt. I also took some stuff out of the cupboards, tied it to the horse, mounted it and rode for two whole days. Everywhere I came I inquired for Bronco, and I quickly picked up his track of destruction and misery. I always came close, but just too late to cross his path. One day, near the end of august I was however lucky. I talked to a guy in a saloon that told me he was going to participate in a high rollers card game, at which "Bronco, the known outlaw" would also be present. He prided himself on this fact.

I rode to the saloon, some ten miles further down the railway. I tied down my horse to a post and I got inside. It was a dusty little thing, quite like any other shithole on this side of the ocean, in this day and age.

I ordered myself some whiskey and stood waiting at the end of the bar, looking closely at the doors of the saloon. The doors flapped, though I didn’t see anyone coming in and about that instant everything grew very silent.

I looked at my stomach. There was something there. It didn’t really belong. I had never seen it in that place before. It was quickly turning cold around me. I looked at my hands only to find they were covered in blood. I wondered who was bleeding and I turned around.

I looked straight into the grinning face of Gangbang Bronco. His lips moved but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He grabbed the handle of the thing that had intruded my body and he pulled it out. "Susan", or whatever he called that thing, was moist with my own blood.

The mind leaps in a strange way, as one dies, and maybe the pain and the shock had made me mad but as I looked into the face of that great raping and murdering brute I could not see evil. In my haunted dreams he had been a villain, sadism exemplified, a very solid example of the abstractness of the boundless wickedness of man. But now, as my existence quickly faded, I could see nothing but a man, not good, not bad, and vulnerable in the very same way as any of us. I smiled and even though I couldn’t see it, I felt the surprise on his face. Maybe good and bad are important for men in their lives, running about like fools, but I know that God doesn’t care about them, nor does he understand them.

I fell to the ground. As I lie dying I am thinking about my life and I know I might as well hadn’t lived. It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me at all.