ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 1)


He was scarred in all kinds of new ways, new souvenirs, deeper and uglier than the ones he went in with, missing a tooth, smoking more than he had before, but he came out, came back home unraped, unbeaten, and less afraid than ever. He got a job with his uncle, working as a clerk in the mornings answering the phone and working the cash register. He got a room in Delford, a rough-drawn haphazard little town, no straight roads anywhere. He bought weed and sat by his window in the evenings and smoked and planned.

Oh, how he hated the world. He wanted to kill and kill and never stop killing. He wanted to walk into restaurants and dump a bucket of gasoline on somebody and set them on fire. He wanted to get a gun and fire tight groupings into walking bodies. He wanted to strangle, to decapitate. Thing was, now he could do it. Prison had given him the key to the hole where the animals were kept. Now all he wanted was for somebody to set him off.

There she was sitting on the veranda swing, the Great White Goddess in all her glory. She would see him standing behind the tree and imagine he still cared, still the little loser who loved her and couldn't find anybody else who wanted him. He was the one she had wanted when she still thought he was stronger and blacker than he turned out to be. Yeah man, she got herself a real nigger now, big and black, and this one has money. After prison in Tennessee Neill found that the voices in his head are almost always African American. She was there on the swing looking happy like he had never been in her life and he wanted so much to kill her. Not slowly though, fast and bloody and hard. What did that say?
(END OF PART 1)

RUM PUNCH By Elmore Leonard