Every Last Drop Read Online Free PDF Page B

concept of industry, this will have to serve for all of you.
He holds the bag out at arms length and the girl reaches for it. —Not you, Meager.
He points at the empty bag on the floor.
—Scraps will serve for you.
He offers the bag to Moustache, a grin cracking around the teeth that still trap a bit of my toe between them. —For you, Low, to share with Miserable and Pathetic.
The boy reaches for the bag and the man pulls it back. —And you say what?
Low touches his moustache. —Thanks, Mr. Lament.
Lament smiles again. —Such a good boy.
He gives him the bag. —And all of you?
The kids chorus. —Thanks, Mr. Lament.
He nods. —Yes, manners. When prompted, I know, but some manners, nonetheless.
He flicks his fingers at them.
—Away now. Go feed your disgusting faces away from me.
They scramble for the door, the boys clustered with their half-full bag, the girl trailing, looking at the red residue inside hers.
The door closes.
Laments kinked neck bends toward me.
—Children. One can do little with them short of stuffing them in a sack and tossing them into the river like kittens.
I bleed, eyeing his scalp.
—It was a misstep on my part. I will admit to that much. But the blame is not entirely my own. If I had been listened to, left unmolested in my methodology, I might have avoided the conflict utterly. As it was I had no choice but to confront the rabble.
He wheels himself to the fridge and takes out one of the bags of trotters. —I had operated in admirable discretion.
A gnarled finger pokes into the bag and comes out with a trotter. He holds it before milky eyes and studies it. —Until they manifested.
He digs a bit of meat from between the pig toes and sucks it from his yellow nails. —Mungiki savages.
He rotates the trotter, finds more sinew, tears it loose with his teeth. —It would be almost comical. Their pretensions. That is to say, not only are they not from Kenya, but most of them are not even negroid.
He licks the trotter, sucks a last twist of gristle from it, and tosses it aside, plucking another from the bag. —Skag Baron Menace.
He spits on the floor. —Filthy child. He read about the Mungiki in a magazine article.
He waves the fresh trotter at the moldy magazines and newspapers heaped along the walls, barricading the windows. —An article from my library, no less. Yes, this is ironic.
He pops the whole trotter in his mouth, rolls it about, the sound of cracking cartilage loud, then opens his mouth, dribbling the stripped foot onto his hand then dropping it to the floor. —Kenyan gangs that thrive on kidnappings and protection rackets. Political
party enforcers that cultivate legends of their own brutality. They keep oil drums of blood. And drink it. So the stories go in backwater Kenya. If it is not redundant to use the words backwater and Kenya together in a sentence.
He holds the bag up, shakes it, doesn't find what he wants and puts it back inside the fridge.
—Menace thought it was clever, naming his little litter of hyenas after the blood-drinking gangsters. Clever? As if cleverness is a thing that ever happened inside Menace's feeble head.
He rolls to a small shelf of books, pulls down a moisture-swollen Webster's and flaps it open in his lap.
—Not even his own name is his. Menace. Something that threatens to cause evil, harm, injury, etc. I gave him that name. I had hoped it might instill some sense of pride in him, some modicum of self-respect. Something for him to aspire to. Better if I had done as I originally planned and named him Insipid.
He slaps the dictionary closed.
—Perhaps it did inspire him. Sent him off to new territories. Queens. Indeed. As if that was my fault. They act as if it was my fault. His adventurism of my making. But it was meddling in my methods that caused the problems. They have bred their own complications, not I. Little hairy monkey with dreams of his own empire. Skag Baron. The pretension of it. That little scrap of half-nigger

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