Savages

123

His baditude tamed

Chon nevertheless has a gun in his hand as he stands on the deck, looks out at the ocean, and doesn’t really see it.

What he sees instead is

—himself killing people.

He would like to kill—

Hernan Lauter, and

The fucker who was holding the chain saw, and—

Hernan Lauter again.

Chon would like to start every day by killing Hernan Lauter and in a sense he does because he wakes up from what little sleep he gets by thinking about it. It’s a little tricky to imagine it in detail, as he’s never seen Lauter, but Chon goes with his mental image.

Sometimes Lauter is fat; others, skinny; young, old, jowly, sunken, various shades of brown or white skin, his hair is jet black, it’s white, it’s silver, it’s thick or thin.

The method of killing him never varies, though.

Of course, of course in his fantasy Chon puts a pistol into Lauter’s mouth and pulls the trigger.

Two shots—

—bam bam—

—then he gut-shoots the chain saw fucker, and while he is conveniently bent over Chon lops off his melon and tosses it at O’s feet—

—gallant that he is—

Ever honest, Chon isn’t really sure if his rage emanates more from what Hernan did to him or from what he did to O. Knows it should be the latter but is probably more the former because at the end of the day you really can’t feel someone else’s pain, you can only imagine it.

But he has a sense of what she feels because Lauter showed them both their imminent deaths.

His impotent—he selects the word deliberately—rage.

Because he knows that he can’t actualize (there’s a fucked-up non-word)

He can’t act on

act out

his rage.

No amount of Viagra or Cialis will allow him to actually kill or even get within killing distance of Hernan Lauter. He’s powerless to do it, so

his rage is an internal storm

brewing violently, getting stronger because it is contained

(tempest, teapot)

which, of course,

creates more

rage.