God: Stories and Experiments

The Church and the City

The Church and the City

When it came time to actually shoot the beast- I couldn't understand the natives when they gave me its English name- my brother was much more excited than I. What had I expected, dragging a soldier with me. He was tough, a veteran, fresh out of the great war. His medals and posture attested to a man on whom infinite pressure could be placed, and from whom infinite success would come. He would lead you to victory, if only you were as strong as he was. And no one could be.

Coolidge had just been elected- my vote, not his- and I had later made a mountain of ingots in that American suicide known as the stock market. I decided to put the cash to good use by hunting in the Sichuan province for three weeks, trying to catch site of the elusive Bighorn wild sheep. It wasn't really hunting. It was a pathetic shadow of the hunt, a weak and watered down immature version of the noble sport, since all I wanted was a vision.

“Wild John” Hartley, as his loyal gunners had called him in the war, pricked up his ears at the sound of a hunt, and chased after me, bringing death and brashness to the most beautiful land on earth.

He was so American, he swaggered with offensive cheerfulness as he guzzled beer and rutted with the natives. You may call me mad and bitter, but I had put up with everything silently.

That is, until we captured the animal. Not a sheep, I suspect now that we arrived much too late in the season for them. But we found a living thing- some sort of bear it seems. He's a lot more human than anyone cares to notice. Except me. I empathize.

I recalled briefly a scene at breakfast, it seemed a million years ago, when my father (Henry Roth Hartley) had told me that my opinion didn't matter, and I called him a royal ass. He had beat me black and blue, but I knew I was wrong. I understand to this day that he held me in the highest disdain, and I understand why.

He was a goddamn general.

Not one of Henry Hartley's endless successes were living people, they were all trophies to be stuffed and mounted on a plaster wall.

His oldest son; a cheap and shaking copy of the father, fiery and impersonal, his youngest son; a baby. I am the disappointment in both of their lives, lives that no journalist could find disappointment in.

I think sometimes I would rather be stuffed.

“Stan, you better tell these chinks to lay the hell off me!” John had snapped me out of my self-pitying reverie. I hated how much I thought about my past, hated how whiny I had become.

“What now Jonathan?”

“They keep saying we're getting to close to the city. Hong-Kong, if I can understand their jabbering.”

A pause where the pregnant air seeped heavily between us.

“Stan?” His question was more like a statement. A resolute introduction, a preamble.

“We gotta shoot the goddamn son of a bitch right now. It's weighing too heavily on my sleep. We ain't gonna be the first to kill the bear if we keep waiting. There's other parties in Chink-land, and there's other people with guns. Kill it. You think he's funny, or whatever, I don't care. Kill the goddamn thing right now.”

I let the mist roll over us, gathering a tint of green from the Korean Pines and Rhododendrons. The air was heavy and blanket-like, so pressurized that it drove the great river to our East into a flat crawl.

“John, we're gonna be the first to bring one back alive. For science? Don't you goddamn care about science? Let's show the world something- you know?”

“No. It's head, on a mount. NOW!”

They say it's called a “Shawng-Maow”. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a name. There's only one of them in the world, to me, and I've never heard “Shawng-Maow” applied to anything else. That's a name, to me.