IN A BLACK-AND-WHITE FILM, a serious-looking guy says in a fatherly tone: “Go west, young man. There you will find wealth, fame, and adventure.”

The time of day, the weather, the town and the room, nothing is specified—it resembles all the places he’s been and the times he was there, all at once. He feels warmth, a pulsing in his groins, happiness around the corner, barely supportable but unstoppable, and that’s how he knows he’s young and strong, and the sky is bright in the town, or maybe it’s on an island—because he can hear the sea and the sound of a moped. Some rays of sunlight penetrate through the curtain on the balcony, flicker in the open doorway, over the shoulders and naked thigh of his wife and shine on her brown mane. She is sleeping. He presses his lips into her back. He enters her without waking her, slowly and deeply, seeking in that depth the mystery far inside a woman, which overwhelms him every time. He holds her in his arms, and his mouth is full of her hair. He draws her to him with a hint of fear from backstage that this is all going to stop. These are the first years of our marriage, he thinks, and he lays his hand against her bare belly, chews her hair, her nape. As he presses himself against her backside, through the open balcony he sees this same wife of his crossing the road in a white raincoat and a Ferrari suddenly speeding up, knocking her down and running over her, over her head, and then in reverse, back over her birdlike ribs. His wife becomes a plastic blow-up doll with round lips for rubber cunnilingus, and the Ferrari’s vermillion tempera disperses, flooding the image, the balcony, filling the room, the bed, his mouth, his nose and the television set.

Before his eyes fill completely with blood, Ned catches sight of a man on the television in a black-and-white fatherly voice repeating: “Go west, young man. There you will find wealth, fame, and adventure.” And now the ads.

Go west, young man. And there you will find wealth, fame and adventure.

Holy shit, turn it down!

Go west, young man, and there you will find / Go west, young man, and there you will find / Go west, young man…

“Hey, you! Hey, kid! Hey, Tod, goddammit! Someone’s trying to sleep here, for God’s sake! Turn that fucking thing off!”

He tries to say that, he hears the words in his head, but his tongue won’t obey him, it lies in the bottom of his mouth, like something dead.

“Well, well—Ned, you’re alive. You’ve forgotten what today is? It’s half past two, man, we don’t have much daylight left. We have to show up at the shoot, man, it’d be okay to get there on time, you know,” says Tod. “At least for the final showdown.”

Ned tries to raise his head, but it doesn’t work, it’s nailed to the pillow.

“You recognized that, huh? Who says: go west, young man? Senator, it’s Senator, what’s his name… Sorry, I’ll be right back, that’s my cell,” says Tod.

“And why the fucking fuck, go fucking west. What a damn idiotic fascination. Myth. Any shithead with any brains and a few dollars in his pocket goes to the fucking east these days. Near, far, and the not-so-far east—whatever. Why even such a fuckup as me goes east,” replies Ned Montgomery, but his words still refuse to emerge from him.

After a few tottering false starts, he gets up, straightens, and staggers towards the toilet.

“What a dream, oh my God, what a goddamn nightmare,” he thinks. “When I drink, I always dream the same crap.”

When Tod had tipped him onto the bed early that morning, drunk and filthy from the previous night, he had pulled off his trousers and soiled underpants—they were tossed down behind a chair—and now Ned, at this moment, leaning against the wall, notices his thin hairy legs, knobbly knees, and drooping balls a little surprised, as though he is seeing that jumble of skin, hair, and organs for the first time.

Tod is sitting at the improvized desk where there is a laptop, a few unwashed coffee cups, and a scatter of Snickers wrappers. He is smoking a cigar.

“When we get to the final showdown, did you know, man, that in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral thirty-four bullets were fired in five minutes. But it took them four days to shoot those five minutes! You didn’t know? What kind of film star are you, man?” he shouts to Ned through the half-open toilet door.

What in hell’s name is that dickhead Tod doing now?

Ned tries to aim at the toilet bowl, but his urine trickles in a feeble, painful stream down his legs onto the tiles. He curses, wipes himself down with toilet paper, and flushes, leaning his full weight on the handle.

Tod is now sitting on the floor of their apartment with three remotes in front of him, clicking on a laptop with one hand and holding a cell phone under his chin.

“Look!” he whispers in Ned’s direction, gesturing toward the new film on the television.

John Wayne really was a tall son of a bitch, taller than me, Ned thinks, squinting at the TV and swaying toward the minibar. Since he quit smoking, he has needed increasing quantities of whiskey and beer.

In front of Tod there is a large cardboard box crammed with videocassettes. A black video player, dating from the late nineteen-eighties, is farting and purring.

“What the—”

Tod tosses him a pair of his underpants from the pile of clean clothes that the maid brought that morning washed and ironed: “Put those on, man, you look spectral; skin and bone. Your damn tool is fatter than your leg.”

“—hell is that?” Ned finishes his sentence, trying to squeeze the whiskey from the bottom of the bottle into a glass.

“These? Westerns. Recorded from the TV, hey, hey. Oh you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve been looking at them all morning, my bro. I’m crammed with noble emotions, man. Look me in the eye! I feel somehow mythic. At least until I look at you. Sweet Jesus, Ned, you’re a carcass. A phantom. You’re destroying my idols, man.”

Ned finally pulls on his underpants, flops into an armchair, and yawns broadly.

Wayne, known as Courage, drunk, fires at a rat and says to the ugly girl: “You can’t take out an injunction on a rat, you gotta either let it go or kill it.”

An optimistic approach, thinks Ned. That’s why the damn idealism of westerns kicked the fucking bucket. Time trampled them.

“You have to learn to live like a rat, Johnny,” says Ned to the TV.

“A girl brought us this box, full of cassettes, this morning. a devotee of yours, man, you know those dolls,” Tod goes on. “She wants Mr. Montgomery to have it—why, imagine. I said, Go on, honey, don’t worry, give it to Uncle Tod. And I took her by her little hand. He, he. A doll, get it? When she went out the door, I thought the box would be going straight in the trash, but in the end, you see, I’ve had a good time with these films, man. Like I was a kid again, you know?”

“Throw it in the damn trash. What’ll I do with it?”

Those fans are sick, they keep bringing him all kinds of fucking garbage. Can you actually be a fan and at the same time be a normal man or, especially impossible, a normal woman, thinks Ned.

“Hey, Ned, look, there are some of your films as well. Virgil’s Return.”

“Throw that shit in the trash and let’s go to the damn shoot.”

Before leaving, he takes a look in the mirror and tries to pull his stomach in. In the end he gives up and simply takes his shirt out of his jeans. Tod’s right, he looks like an old fart, he thinks.

“Well, sister, the time has come for me to ride hard and fast,” Wayne’s voice can be heard as they close the apartment door.

It’s going to be a bad day even for people with less luck.

Everything points to it, Ned, it would’ve been better if you’d stayed in bed.

“You coming, man?” Tod yells from the elevator.

“Let’s go, sister, the time has come for us to ride hard and fast,” replies Ned, pressing the 0 button.

It’s a sunny day in Majurina. Čarija and Tomi’s three triplets stand on different sides of a wire fence, talking.

“Pa says ’e’ll frash yous if yous mention the dead again,” says one of the little blond girls.

Maria looks at them longingly: Tomi’s triplets won’t let her hug them or pick them up. She’d carry them to and fro, up the field and down the field, until they grew big, she’d dress them in party skirts. She’d sing to them. Since she first heard them crying in the next-door house, here in Majurina, she thinks only of them. She thinks of her hens as well, because they’re her responsibility.

“Pssst, listen, the dead occupiers’re clattering their little bones under the earth,” says Maria Čarija.

“‘s not true,” says one of the triplets. “Tomi says you’re crazy.”

Maria offers them rubber sweets through the wire fence.

“Here, signorinas—and ask your teacher! All the pits and streams’re full of the bones of the dead occupiers,” says Maria.

“But we doesn’t go to school, Aunty Maria, we’re too little. You’s talking rot.”

“Anyone can see you don’t go to school! Eating sweets with filthy hands,” says Maria, spitting on her skirt and using it to clean her nieces’ little fingers as they push them through the fence.

Later, Maria Čarija puts on her patent-leather boots, pink, a bit scuffed, with broken heels, and thrusts her things into a plastic bag: a comb, dry twigs, a Rubik’s cube, lip salve, and hair slides. And since she feels that the bag is half empty, she adds what is on hand: one of her father’s socks, a route map of Croatia, mascara, two used pairs of panties with lace, L’Italiano per Lei, and a pebble she found by the railway line. Satisfied and quite ready, she sets out to look for her hen.

This keeps happening: she finds the hen, with white feathers, a whole kilometer beyond Majurina, where the cowboys are making their film.

Maria calls to the hen: “Come chook, come chook, chook-chook-chook.”

That call is familiar to starlings and pheasants, they all come for the grain, all except that one hen.

Around the container trucks and tents down on the flatland, a small garden has sprung up with a wooden fence and a mini chicken coop. They’ve brought in feathered extras and they feed them with GM maize, which Čarija’s hen is mad about and goes charging off against the natural limitations of her kind: showing distinct signs of curiosity and free will.

In some poultry sense, she is the first astronaut to have descended from the Milky Way.

At the filling station, Ned Montgomery watches his agent Tod pour gas in a short-sleeved T-shirt bearing the inscription BIG BLACK. Tod’s smooth, bald head gleams in the sun, his big blue eyes squint in the sun, and his big feminine backside sways after him, as though it has a life apart from the rest of his body. All in all, if it weren’t for his beard, Tod would look like a fat woman, thinks Ned.

Tod pays and comes back with a heap of Snickers for himself and two cans of beer for his partner. It suddenly occurs to Ned, clutching the steering wheel in an effort to control the way his hands are shaking, like a disagreeable discovery his own organism had hidden from him, like, for instance, a wart in a private place, that this damn son of a bitch Tod is the only person in the world on whom, at this moment, he can rely, the only one, since his wife died, who takes some kind of care of him.

How did it happen that Ned Montgomery has become the more fucked-up half of the Ned and Tod team? thinks Ned.

They look like those pairs of comics, dancers, or gay designers. But it could be worse, damn it all; they could be Ned and Ted.

He doesn’t remember which came first, Chiara’s death or bankruptcy and mortgage or divorce and all that chaos that crashed down onto him while he was sleeping, blind drunk and totally stoned, on the floor of some hotel room.

But if your name is Ned Montgomery, some bastard named Tod will usually show up to put you under the shower and settle your bills. That’s a piece of luck, probably.

However you look at it, I am at the tender mercies of my fucking agent Tod, this goddamm freak who wears T-shirts with the names of goddamn bands, smokes cigarettes like goddamn Orson, and who I didn’t even know till four years ago, thinks Ned. I don’t even know if I like or loathe him.

But anyway there’s nothing to be done right now, drink up your beer, put yourself in the hands of Jesus and be grateful, Montgomery.

A little girl with peroxide hair had washed and polished the pickup’s windows: in the windscreen is clear bright sky, motionless and aseptic blue, evidence that perfection exists. A few moments before a real autumnal northerly gale had got up, shaving the town and Old Settlement dry.

“Oh man, that’s some evil wind, let’s go,” he says, banging the car door, climbing into the passenger seat and lighting a cigarette, that damn brute, his coproducer, co-screenwriter, copilot, friend, Tod.

At the same time:

Down on the exposed flatland, among the burrs, in front of the prefab town, the cameraman, the director, assistants, and the whole retinue of actors are swallowing dust, smoking, and staring into the distance waiting for Montgomery’s pickup.

The old man has let them know he’s not satisfied with the scenes of the final showdown. They’ll have to shoot them again, he said. In his damn presence, he said. He hadn’t seemed all that interested in the film, he hadn’t appeared all this time, so why does he suddenly care about the final showdown? the film crew wonders.

Some gunslinger extras from the local gun club are sitting on a little wall beside the chicken coop behind the horse paddock, some distance from the rest of the team. They’re on their way back from a shooting contest. Some of them have spent the morning trickling spit and making little muddy oases between their feet, others loading their weapons for practice. They keep together, but apart from the rest of the team, drinking beer and saying nothing. Waiting makes them nervous.

One of them has taken his weapon out of the club’s minivan and is shooting at empty bottles; the others join him readily. They have shattered the bottles into tiny pieces and shifted their aim to the hens, which, not suspecting anything bad, are calmly pecking a few meters away and just occasionally squawking, disturbed by the splintering glass.

The lads are trying to shoot their heads off with one shot, and for the time being it’s going well.

The hens don’t even get a chance to spread their wings in surprise and squawk before a bullet whines and guillotines them. Some run around headless, others fall at once, as though scythed.

“Idleness is evil, man,” Tod will say later, commenting on the massacre.

The rest of the crew, it seems, finally realize what’s going on, because they start shouting. A small Americano in a Borsalino (most of the others have taken off their cowboy hats, because of the wind), who could be the director, yells that he’s going to call the police.

“Bastards! Don’t shoot the chickens!” shouts the Americano.

One bullet whines in his direction (“This one’s for you!”) but the firing and shooting of the poultry stops.

Now both sides, each from their own end of the open space, are weighing each other up distrustfully.

An ominous silence hovers in the air; only the wind whines and sends an occasional plastic bag bowling along from the prairie. Crows sit on the black branches.

But if we listen more closely, we can hear a rustle, then footsteps through the grass and a voice.

An unknown woman appears from behind the paddock with plastic bags in her hands and, as far as can be made out, she seems to be calling a hen.

The gunslingers turn their heads toward the new arrival. They stare at the vision of a young woman with large yellow teeth.

When she notices them, she completely changes and smiles at them seductively. Totally deranged bitch, they think. Her skirt—Spanish style, with a floral pattern—is pulled up under her breasts, and she is wearing boots with no heels. Under her shock of bleached white and yellow curls, two wild, enflamed green eyes gaze steadily at the men.

Then Čarija screams softly: she catches sight of the dirty white hen whose body, headless, is still twitching.

The aroma of a butcher’s shop wafts on gusts of wind.

“Hey, here’s Lily of the West come to see us, brother!” says the first gunslinger, apparently the group leader, judging by his stance.

Čarija spits a gob in his direction, which hits him in the face.

“Crazy bitch, damn you!” says the first gunslinger, loading his gun.

“Eeehaaah!” shouts another, cracking his whip in the air toward the girl. Maria jumps out of the way and growls. “Eeehaaah, brother!” The man cracks his whip in the dust.

The men start laughing.

The woman drops her bag in alarm and its contents spill out. Then she runs a few meters, stops in the middle of the field, and—not taking her eyes off her enemy—with her fingers spread she pats her open mouth several times briefly and jerkily: “Va-va-va-va…”

And speeds to the hill, more swiftly than a vixen.

“Oh, brother, that’s some crazy bitch,” says gunslinger number three. He blows at his trigger, takes aim, and shoots off the head of a crow attracted by the smell of fresh hen’s blood.

But where have Ned and Tod gone?

Just here, the road their pickup is travelling on abruptly changes from four lanes to two. The speed limit is sixty, but everyone drives at least eighty, if not a hundred kilometers an hour: drivers here usually lose all sense of speed. Sometimes, at precisely this place, from one of the un-made-up side tracks, a farmer in a tractor comes onto the highway, slowing the traffic completely, virtually stopping it.

So Ned and Tod, driving behind a tractor, can see through the washed windows of the truck an azure strip of sea and the chimney of the cement factory on the left and a poster in front of the pastoral center, with JESUS LOVES YOU on it on the right, and a traffic policeman watching out for drivers behind the discount store and two stray dogs passing beneath the newly washed larger-than-life General Gotovina, one behind the other, along the narrow dusty track beside the highway and turning off along the concrete stream bed near the new buildings for war veterans and there disappearing from view.

“Oh man, have you ever seen a dump like this?” says Tod, peeling the wrapping from a Snickers bar.

“I’ll tell you this, my friend, I’ve been in Europe and Africa and Australia, in Russia, both Americas, not to mention Austria and Hungary, Slovakia… I’ve been on the Slovene border and in Tirana. I’ve been in damn Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife, in Rwanda and Niš, on the Ivory Coast, in Georgia and Colombia, but I have never ever seen such a shitty suburb as this,” says Ned.

“Aren’t you from somewhere around here on your mother’s side, man?” asks Tod.

“Oh yeah, maybe. But maybe not. You know, I’m more and more inclined to think not,” Ned smiles and swallows a swig of beer. “Anyway, Tod, aren’t you from Gilroy, the smelliest town in California, best known for its diabolical garlic ice cream?”

“That’s right, Ned,” Tod grimaces. “You’ll see, up there on the hill there’s a quarry, grass, and wilderness, better than Almeria for filming. The colors are sharper, everything’s more intense. And let’s not ignore this item, Ned—it’s fucking cheaper.”

Between the asphalt on one side and the brambles, groundsel, and unplastered houses on the other side of an imagined pavement, the wind raises dust, blows dry uprooted shrubs and trash about. Here—behind yet another gas station and a few inns where suckling pigs turn nonstop on a spit—Ned’s pickup, following a road sign, turns off toward a local cemetery, and then, if they’re thinking of reaching their destination, they ought to continue across the railway line along tarmac through the olive groves in the prairie.

Let’s wish them a safe journey, because we leave the road here and climb up a goat track for a hundred meters or so up onto a hill. In front of us is a former slaughterhouse, behind the slaughterhouse is a copse, and in it a field chapel. From this spot, there is a magnificent view of the channel, the sea, and the Old Settlement, but also of the nearby quarry that has served as a garbage dump for years.

Just where the quarry ends is where there begin to rise up what are ugly buildings even for this part of the world: this is Majurina, the country estate, the ranch, tenure, smallholding of the old railway-track tribe—the relatives of the Iroquois Brothers.

* * *

The woman kicking the rotten gate in the fence and breaking into the scene is Maria.

Fortunately, her pa is behind the house, sheltered from the wind, feeling blue heads of cabbages with his black hands and choosing a large one for lunch.

Had he seen the way his daughter came in, the old man would have knocked her to the ground, silently, with a single blow to her back or belly. Then she would have grabbed him—as she had done before now—by his bony calf and bitten into it, dragging him down, lower, toward herself, scratching his face with her nails and whispering: “I’ll do you in, Pa,” and then—because this is what he did for lesser offenses—her father would throw a stone at her, or bash her with a tin bowl or spade, whatever was on hand. He would hitch up his trousers and spit beside the snake. He’d leave her on the ground, writhing, and say: “You got what was coming to you.”

Had it been like that, and fortunately it wasn’t, Tomi’s triplets would have climbed onto the bare branches of the almond tree on the other side of the wire fence, three leggy girls with snotty noses, and, treating themselves to bread and Nutella or meat paste, they would have watched the contest as though it was a game of chess.

When she was thirteen, Maria Čarija had tried to batter her father with a hoe, it was a famous incident in the Old Settlement after which her pa shoved her into a cement mixer. Tomi had pulled her out alive and as enraged as a pagan she-devil.

Tomi Iroquois had warned his uncle not to touch his cousin, so people in the Settlement said.

People also said that mad Maria and her old man ate together, but that from that day on they both slept with knives under their pillows.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to peer into their pigsties and check what’s hidden under their pillows, because time is flying, not standing still, and more important things are happening outside.

And nor do we have any reason not to believe Tomi Iroquois when he says that Maria doesn’t need a cold weapon—she’s too good a shot to dirty her hands.

So, while Maria’s irascible and tousled pa is stepping between the beds of kale and endives, she kicks down the gate in the fence, enters the garden and then the house, where she finds a key with which, hurriedly, before the old codger appears, she opens the cellar door and vanishes into the darkness.

After a while, she appears in the cellar doorway, turns the key in the padlock and emerges into the light: merciless as the sun, sharp as the wind, but silent as the prairie and armed to the teeth.

She speeds, fierce and frowning, through the undergrowth, rushing through the impenetrable broom bushes, slipping down to the railway track where she cuts across the path of a pickup and some baldie with a cigar yells at her in English.

She stares at him dumbfounded. Perhaps she’s never seen anyone like him before.

As they pass, he shows her his middle finger.

Without hesitating, Maria takes out her daddy’s pistol and aims at the passenger’s rear-view mirror. BANG! BANG!

The other one, the driver, leaps off his seat.

“Holy shit, Tod!” He mutters between his teeth and puts his foot hard down. Stones scatter under the tires into the air.

The girl spits and lowers her weapon, then takes off downhill.

The day is waning and the storm subsiding. Now the light is already softer and the plants are turning their stalks toward the west, while a swift, invisible animal bends the burned grass.

Hey, Maria Čarija, where have you set off to with that rifle, crazy lady from the railway track, you who aim at a bird’s eye in flight?

What did Maria find in the cellar?

In the potato store, the Iroquois’ old hiding place, she found: a Glock, a Beretta 92F, an Uzi and two hunting rifles, a Kalashnikov, three Thompsons and a hand grenade; the average arsenal of a railway-track house.

She selected a Winchester with a nice wooden butt, her pa’s favorite—because it’s elegant, because it’s reliable, because it cocks easily and lies best in her hand. She stuffed cartridges and smoke bombs into her pockets.

Legend has it that someone in China dropped saltpeter into a fire and the flame began to spatter like a pyrotechnic fountain. And then Marco Polo brought that toy to the Old Continent. That’s what Daniel, Rusty’s late brother, told the Iroquois, but, nonetheless, who would have believed him, apart from Maria, when no one they knew had been able to make a firework out of saltpeter, just gunpowder for homemade bombs and smoke.

When he was alive, Maria’s relations had called Daniel “Cornboy,” because his hair was neither black nor blond nor brown nor gray, but she had followed him, secretly, she couldn’t stop pursuing him, there was nothing to be done—he was like a magnet.

One long-legged one with a thin mustache who looks like Lee Van Cleef and the other with the expression of a truly upright fellow and ulcer patient like that of Gary Cooper have planted themselves, legs apart, in the middle of the prairie. They survey the scene in all directions in a macho way, then, like two bulls, they fly at one another and grab each other in a firm hold.

Van Cleef whacks Cooper, who gives as good as he gets. They clobber each other, draw back, gnash their teeth, and, waving their hands, they throw themselves on the earth, dust, and scattered straw.

Feathers, straw, dust, and hats—fly through the air.

Cooper gets to his feet, staggers slightly, raises his hand, and misses Lee. But Van Cleef nevertheless smashes into a log and gets a mouthful of earth. He wipes his bloody nose with his sleeve and, seeing the blood, goes berserk.

“You see, Tod, that would never happen in a real western,” says Ned. “The ones who look like damn Lee, they never fight, they’re too well-bred for that, and they’re too good a shot to get their hands dirty.”

At that Van Cleef’s double hurls himself furiously at the fake Cooper, striking sparks from the dust. Their wet neckerchiefs stick to their bare chests while drops of sweat break out on their high, tanned foreheads. As the cowboys roll and groan and scratch, the horses neigh in terror and one runs off—who knows where.

A quasi Grace Kelly whom, according to the screenplay, all the men address as “Hey, gorgeous” or “Hello, sweetheart” approaches her window several times in panic and each time brings her little hand to her lips in horror.

And then Gary takes out his pistol: BANG! And the director in a panama hat shouts: “CUT!”

“You see, Tod, that would never happen in a real western,” says Ned. “The ones who look like good old Gary hit their mark infallibly, but they never, ever draw first.”

What else did Maria find in the cellar?

Sugar and saltpeter.

“This is a rather more complicated smoke bomb,” squad leader Dujković, a friend of Tomi Iroquois, had said once long ago, while the war was still on, “but it can be made in larger quantities.”

The Iroquois Brothers, all nine male relations plus Maria Čarija, had arranged themselves on the settee and the floor, watching, while Dujković stood in the middle of the kitchen, stirring:

“All we need is saltpeter (potassium nitrate, KNO3) and powdered sugar. You can buy saltpeter in any chemist’s, ten grams for three kunas, and sugar isn’t a problem. We can buy larger quantities of saltpeter for fertilizer in a shop in Trogir, two kilos, but it’s less pure so I don’t know if it would work in this combination. The proportions of saltpeter to sugar are three to two. So you take three grams of saltpeter and two of sugar. Take that and put it into a shallow metal pan, where you can mix it easily. Now turn the cooker ring to medium, perhaps a little higher, but not too high, and place the pan on it. In the meantime, while the ring is heating up (don’t do this with gas, as the temperature is too high and it might set fire to the kitchen, as happened to me once), mix the saltpeter and powdered sugar, put it into the pan, and keep stirring. Gradually a sticky mass will form, eventually becoming coffee colored. When that happens, take your freshly made smoke bomb off the heat and form it into whatever shape you like. To test it, set light to a small quantity with a lighter… there, there! It’s smoking, see! Ammonia nitrate is a wickedly insensitive explosive. It’s more likely that your pillow would explode than AN. It becomes sensitive in combination with liquid explosives, and can be detonated by quite a weak detonator. This is how I get a proper explosion: buy KAN fertilizer or fluorine, or pinch it from your uncle’s cellar.”

Rumor had it that Dujković was a little mad and that he had gone to pieces over a Serbian girl when her parents left for Belgrade overnight, taking her away.

Dujković later told everyone prepared or obliged to listen to him, including the Iroquois Brothers, that the “runaway had screwed with him at fourteen.” When he got drunk, he would yell that he’d “make that little Serbian bitch pay” when he found her. He joined the Home Guard before he was eighteen and at nineteen he trod on a booby trap. They say that one day he simply ran into a minefield.

The girl came to look for him some years later. When she couldn’t find him, she sat down on the steps of her former house and stayed there for eight hours. She never came back after that.

Maria had seen them, she wasn’t the only one chasing Daniel—they were hunting him like hounds after a fox.

They had brought a little girl with them, sister of Ear and that new kid who had recently moved to the Settlement.

A rottweiler known as Tiny, who ended up with a bullet in his back, and red-haired Daniel were standing, legs apart, in the middle of an empty car park, measuring each other up in a macho way. Then they launched themselves at each other and got a good hold. Tiny swung at Daniel, who gave as good as he got. They laid into each other, snorting and waving their arms, they threw themselves down on the asphalt and sand and the flowerbeds around the streetlights. Daniel got up, staggered, and missed Tiny. But Tiny still crashed over a step and got a mouthful of earth, he wiped his bloody nose with his sleeve and spat, and—seeing the blood—went berserk. And he threw himself at Daniel and everything exploded. Daniel grabbed his jacket and hurled him onto the ground. And then Ear, a mad terrier, Tiny’s mate, whacked Daniel on the neck with a piece of board. Tiny growled and drew out his infamous long flick knife, snapping it open.

Daniel stepped back between the parked trucks and drew his pistol, braced himself, stretched out his arms, and aimed at them.

But everyone in the Settlement knew that this pistol didn’t work. Maria knew too. They knew about it in town, and at school, about the boy who carried a dud pistol.

There was a silence, then laughter, and guffaws.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Daniel fell. No one had touched him; he simply collapsed onto the ground. Tiny kicked him, hit him, put his knife under his chin, but Daniel didn’t stir.

When he began to groan, they started kicking him in the thighs, arms and neck.

“That’s enough. Come on, Ear, enough, you’ll kill him,” said Ear’s sister.

“Don’t hit him in the head, I’m not getting banged up because of that cunt,” said Ear to Tiny.

“You’re a real coward, Cornboy, you fainted like a proper piece of skirt,” said Tiny to Daniel.

They moved away for a while, muttering, then finally undid their flies and pissed on him. You’ve got to do that, it’s classic. They took what he had in his pockets and tossed the pistol toward the trash.

The new guy, the one with the mouth organ who used to hang around with them at that time, didn’t touch Daniel, he stood to one side with his hands in his pockets, he looked around as he left, but he didn’t go back.

Maria waited till the sons of bitches had moved sufficiently far away, pushed her way between the trucks, and crawled up to Daniel.

He opened his eyes and sniffed his clothes, touched his head where it had hit the asphalt.

She watched him and as he didn’t say anything, not even scram, she put his pistol in his hand and lay down beside him.

It was cold on the ground, but he didn’t say get lost, as he sometimes did.

He just gazed at the moving clouds and the bright glare of the sun between them. She knew, because she was gazing at them too.

It was cold on the ground, but still—this time, she could have stayed there till morning.

Later she made little bombs just for him, for self-defense, they looked like the Albanian sweet-makers’ rum-bombs, two and a half kunas each; but she never got around to giving them to him.

Whenever he sets off to the cowboys, to his first film job, Angelo, maestro on the mouth organ, doesn’t walk along the road, he takes a roundabout route, through fields and vineyards, then over the railway track, through the undergrowth and tall grass, avoiding the streams overgrown with thorn bushes in which children and asparagus pickers sometimes find the washed and gnawed bones of dead animals and people, left over from several earlier wars that had rumbled through this transitional port of history and geography, somehow incidentally, in passing—leaving behind a lot of waste, desolation, filth, and hysteria. This young man, you will observe from the way he moves, like a highwire dancer, is taking care not to tear his tuxedo, not to dirty his trousers, not to catch himself on a cherry branch as he treads along the dry stone walls that stretch infinitely in four directions.

When the women picking olives, with their olive eyes and olive skins, catch sight of this freshly shorn head out of an anatomical atlas moving above the bushes, they feel like holding it in their laps or at least passing their open hands over the short haircut—the younger ones put their fingers in their mouths and whistle.

Malicious people say that Angelo is a gigolo, but he is not a mannequin from a catwalk, a talking dildo, a toy-boy for women tourists, today he is, take a good look—the prince of the flatlands.

He always keeps to himself, in company he is usually silent unless someone asks him something, but everyone agrees that he has presence, everyone pats him on the back and gladly treats him to a whiskey in the bar of the La Vida Loca restaurant or a beer in the Last Chance.

He is a serial lover, a troubadour and adornment of the world, a being harmless as a butterfly, a sweet birdbrain with firm limbs, fragrant consolation for any girl who needs it.

Not intending any good, let alone harm, he used an ice cream spoon to scoop out the hearts of wise virgins, and made the foolish a little more sensible. They opened their wallets, their legs, and their mouths and later accused the young man of having a stopwatch instead of a heart.

But today it’s different, today he’s the prince of the flatlands as he steps through the fields in his blue tuxedo, he sheds the invisible jewelry that his lovers have hung around his neck, the bangles they clasped round his wrists; the wind has aired the scent of women’s armpits and heavy perfumes from his clothes, cleared away the spit, tears, liquid powder, lubricants with banana extract, and the sourness of vulvas from his skin.

He’s young enough that it’s still possible for an ordinary morning shower to wash him clean.

He forgets the exclamations of joy and screams, the contractions of thighs, the hot breath on his neck and the sobbing, the silver and pink vibrators, the brown, pinkish, and blond clitorises, the stickiness of two bodies colliding and the touching battle of women to reach orgasm and “love me, please” and “come on, please” and all in vain.

He forgets the game as though he had switched off a porn film on the monitor and washed his dick in lavender.

As soon as he showers, shaves, puts on a clean T-shirt, the women and girls evaporate, with their moaning and weeping, and he finds their tears obnoxious.

He fantasizes about a great career and a great love.

That’s why he’s striding along like a cockerel, look at him, full of himself, audacious.

And now he’s already near the bridge.

Out of superstition, he never comes this way, unless he has to—it was here that Daniel, Rusty’s brother, threw himself under a train.

Whenever she goes to the cowboys, Maria doesn’t go across the prairie, over the fields, she scampers around the other way, over the railway track, through the undergrowth, avoiding the streams overgrown with brambles, agaves and the thorns of wild roses in which children sometimes find the bones of dead occupiers.

She tears her skirt with her fingers if it gets in her way, if it prevents her from stepping over a dry stone wall or jumping a fence.

She’s not a mountain nymph from one of her pa’s folk poems, but a dragon.

After she passes under the bridge, from whose concrete vault dirty slime drips as from a wound, she turns to see the rock from which Daniel, Rusty’s late brother, is watching her.

Her relations called him Cornboy, but she was drawn to him as to a flame.

At one time, whenever she caught sight of him on the rock, she would quickly arrange her hair, caress her breasts, rub between her legs, purse her lips, and smirk at him.

Or she would yell at him at the top of her voice.

Or else she would squat and rock on her heels, her head between her knees.

Daniel died in his eighteenth year, jumping from that bridge under an express train.

She had looked for him in vain the whole of the preceding evening and a good part of that day. She found the place in the crushed grass where he had lain, damp with hoarfrost, and traces of the blood that had gushed out of his torn and broken limbs, through his nose and mouth.

She sat there until some inquisitive railway-track children appeared. Then she took herself off home with Daniel’s school-bag on her shoulder. She had found it in the tunnel under the highway, and now it was hers. It was hers, wasn’t it?

Mathematics 4; L’Italiano per Lei; a sandwich, which she immediately ate; and a propelling pencil.

Maria often climbs onto the bridge and looks at the Settlement that is swallowing the golden grass, the olive groves clambering up into the bare hills and the seagulls flying in from the rubbish dump and from the direction of the slaughterhouse; the vineyards sprayed with Bordeaux mixture, poisonous and a childish color, in which dark grapes grow, and dog-rose bushes full of hips and thorns.

They had run across this railway track countless times. The track was the frontier in times of war, just this place beside the bridge where the St. Andrew’s cross is and trains whistle as they pass. They were short battles; ambush attacks.

In the times of peace and privilege brought by good weather, together with their enemies, her Iroquois relatives stole bitter cherries in the fields and searched around the pylon for telephone wires that they would use to make bullets for their catapults. Or else they lowered themselves down into the cave, a closed quarry that served as an illegal garbage dump, and there they found foreign newspapers with smooth shiny pages and gala advertisements. That’s how the afternoons usually passed.

They laid their ears on the tracks and listened to hear whether a train was coming.

Daniel always stayed longest, until the sirens went, until sparks started to leap on the rails from the train’s brakes.

The other boys didn’t let Maria onto the track.

Daniel sometimes told her to get lost, but sometimes let her come near.

Maria lays her head on the track: on her ear and temple she feels ice or red-hot metal, depending on the season and the time of day.

This is the time of impending death, soon the plants will wither and the bumblebees and other insects are already turning onto their backs as they fly.

She listens to the underground shifting beneath the surface of the soil—down there nothing has changed. Under the earth there is abundant life and death: tubers and bulbs turn into humus and a mole scratches under its crisp crust, ants grind grains of red soil into friable granules, and in the deeper layers fat white worms munch the hearts of the dead, an underground stream bursts its way through the clay; in the dense, saturated darkness silver and gold veins explode, minerals crackle, mandrake roots scream, while dead occupiers rearrange their bones.

Everything that falls onto the earth becomes nourishment, which someone on the underside of the pavement reheats, melts, and sucks up through little straws.

If you don’t believe this, ask yourself where all those fruits and large or small animal corpses, which no one collects or buries, disappear.

And if you still don’t believe it—leave a dead dog in a field and in sixty days you will find only a dry tail. That’s why Maria listens and never lies on the earth for long.

Out of superstition, Angelo never passes underneath the bridge, unless he really has to; he avoids it. Daniel, Rusty’s brother, threw himself under a train there. The boy was a depressive, fuck him, thinks Angelo.

Since then, many of his former mates with whom he had plundered the high roads the year he returned to the Settlement from America had perished: Ear, Tiny, and the younger Barić. The whole secondary-school gang is now rotting under the black earth. Including Daniel, who had once been part of their team, until they began to chase him through the town.

He hadn’t known Daniel well, and he doesn’t remember whether they ever exchanged a word. And he doesn’t know why they laid into him, he never asked. They beat up plenty of others, too. Sometimes they’d dream up a reason, sometimes they were just bored. Nothing particular. Mostly boredom. A reason is easily found.

And if the wolf doesn’t have a cap, the bear clobbers him while the rabbit cheers. If he does have a cap, same thing.

When Daniel killed himself, everyone said they were sorry. Everyone, apart from Angelo, went to the funeral: Tiny and Ear. Fuck it, the boy was a depressive, they said, which was shitty of them. If he hadn’t killed himself, maybe they would have done it, who knows, Angelo thinks.

That time when they had run into Daniel in the empty car park and hammered him, he had turned around to check whether Daniel was alive.

He hadn’t stopped, as he wasn’t crazy; if you weren’t with them, with Tiny and Ear, you’d be the next to be crying, pissed on, in the street. The whole town knew that. Apparently.

Angelo shakes the doubt from his heart as easily as a puppy shakes off dirty water.

He’s still young enough for ordinary shower gel to be able to wash him clean and the wind to dry him, he thinks.

That’s why he sails like a harvest moon, full of himself.

He doesn’t pause until, from the top, he catches sight of a colorful apparition moving in the distance in the same direction as him.

At the same time, just a few minutes’ walk away:

What the hell was that dotard Ned up to now? thought Tod.

He had been holed up in that chemical toilet for twenty minutes.

If Tod had had his way, those idiots who had carried out the massacre of the fowl would by now have been in a police car on their way to their idiot village, which like all idiot villages in this world no doubt prides itself on its idiocy.

But Ned, oh yes, that guy never for an instant forgets that he is Ned Montgomery, man. He had swayed up to the gunslinger from B, like a cowboy, with a cigar in his mouth, and said: “Save the damn bullets, boys.”

That was how Tod’s teacher, in Gilroy, California, would have confiscated the kids’ water pistols till the end of the lesson, thought Tod.

And what a spectacular final showdown, man, why this isn’t Hollywood, for God’s sake, give me a break, amigo. Let’s go, finally, finish the job and pick up our check.

“Hey, Ned, you okay, old man?” Tod knocks on the door of the chemical toilet. “D’you think you could get a bit of a move on?”

(Swearing from inside.)

The door opens and Ned comes out, in clean clothes.

“Surprise,” says Ned.

“Hee, hee,” he says. “I’m going to shoot in the damn final showdown too,” he says. He takes two golden Colts, of the six he has, out from under his leather coat, real buffalo skin, and spins them on his fingers. An old trick, Ned Montgomery never needed a double.

I’ve never understood what in hell’s name he needs with those six pistols, man, he’s not Shiva! thinks Tod.

Hell, Ned, that’s not in the screenplay, he starts to say, but his cigar singes him.

Mr. Montgomery, that’s not in the screenplay, the Americano director starts to say, but concludes that it’s not advisable and there’s no point in protesting.

“Let’s go, boys,” says Montgomery, tilting his hat. “Let’s go film! Drag yourselves over to me here, since I’ve dragged my magnificent butt over the ocean to you. It’s time for a real goddamn turbo western party.”

“Oh, man.”

We left Angelo sailing like a full moon, above the olive groves and stopping, for a moment, when he catches sight from the hilltop of a figure a bit further off stirring up dust in the same direction as himself. He recognizes Tomi Iroquois’s relation, the one who hisses at him when they meet on the road, so he slows down, letting that crazy woman move as far ahead as possible.

Today the charmer Angelo believes that he’s happy, because he thinks he’s in love with Rusty, the girl who, at this moment, on the other side of town, is getting onto a train and leaving him.

But he knows nothing of that, he takes his harmonica, his Pocket Pal, out of his pocket, spreads his palm, and his hand opens into a peacock’s tail while his lips become a starling’s beak. He weaves tunes, a little sweet and a little sad. In his head he is Sugar Blue.

He dreams about a great career as a musician, and he thinks about an ordinary, true love.

He believed that love was big and clear, but real and tangible, like a monolith, which is a fairly ignorant notion. Now that he’s inside it, he can see a bit—it’s a moist box containing two blind hungry greedy kittens. There’s no way out and nothing else exists.

You wanted to tell her things about yourself, sweet Angelo, while you lay naked and completely exposed like really small children, your limbs intertwined in the chilly cellar room.

But you didn’t, that’s how it turned out, she fell asleep or you fell asleep. In short, you put your snout into her ear and mumbled: “Sleep, Rusty.”

She’ll be your best friend, your fratella, your favorite lover, you convince yourself, after just a few days, pressed into those few hours of intimate contact—and your wife.

You really believe that you’re in love with that gangling, rusty girl who is just leaving town, while you, fool, have no clue.

In that unrepeatable second being counted out by your fast, unaccountable heart, you defy the wind, more boldly than the fleeting Kairos and you believe that you are stronger than everything that has lain in store for you so far. Like—the story is about to take a new direction.

And it is, but not exactly the way you hope, sweet Angelo.

Do you not know that it’s your fault your rusty bride has just taken her seat in the train and is leaving you?

Be careful, because this will be a bad day even for people with better luck.

They fired, she crumpled.

She had crept up, stepped out in front of the camera, and yelled: “Now you’re going to pay for your sins!”

All the actor cowboys stopped with their Airsoft responses in their hands.

One shouts: “Lily’s back, brother! She liked it.”

And he fires rata-tat-at-atat in her direction. Some others join him. They laugh. Good joke.

“Are you crazy?” someone shouts.

“Scram, out of my sight!” he shouts, from behind the container.

“Call the police!”

Maria thinks: those are real rifles and pistols, they’re shooting at her.

Fucking cretins, fucking cretins, they’re shooting at her.

She’s cut her lip and her blouse is filthy. She throws two smoke bombs, nimbly, like a real railway-track savage, rolls back, behind the horse’s paddock, aims between the feet of some of the enemies and fires. Her Winchester isn’t a model; her bullets are real. Maria Čarija can hit the eye of a bird in flight, if only she wants to.

The cowboys all shit themselves, they scamper behind barrels, props, horses, anything. Some fly headfirst into brambles, not caring, running for their lives.

Fucking cretins, now dare to shoot.

“Throw down your weapons, in Christ’s name!” shouted the man in the long leather coat she had seen half an hour earlier in the pickup. “All of you!”

He has stepped into the middle of the flatland with his arms raised—he is standing in the line of fire. He throws down one by one, all six of his golden pistols, so that Maria sees. Beside him, Maria observes, stands a man with a camera, also with his hands up, and that guy who looks like a bearded, bald woman, from the pickup, who showed her his finger. He’s crying.

Maria holds her rifle against her shoulder, her hand is still. She watches them—through the barrel—as they fill their pants.

“All put your hands up and come out!” shouts Maria. “Someone’s got to pay for this fuck-up! For my hen!”

Her eyes are almost stuck together with crusts, her face is dirty and her lip stings. She has only one boot on her foot, and that’s only half on. She drags it after her. No one stirs. And the wind has dropped.

A crow says: Caw. It flutters to another tree and repeats: Caw.

Through a curtain of smoke, onto the stage steps Angelo.

He stops in the middle of it all, not understanding what’s going on. Is this a film? Who’s doing the shooting?

“What’s this? Is it the film?” asks Angelo.

In the midst of the silence his voice cracks as though thrown into a well.

Čarija gives a start, turns her rifle toward him for a moment, measuring him up with contempt. He’s not dangerous, thinks Maria. He’s chicken shit, he’s standing aside.

And she aims the rifle barrel at that dubious trio with their hands in the air.

The woman who makes the coffee for the film crew had crouched down and covered her head with her jacket. She could be heard calling for help under her breath. Caw. Caw.

But when Maria Čarija turned her gun away, Angelo had quickly reached his hand into his pocket.

She aims, quickly, and hits him in the hand.

Immediately, as though it had been waiting for an excuse to be fired, someone’s bullet, a real bullet, hits her. Then another.

Maria looks at Angelo in surprise. She fires again and hits him in the chest.

Angelo looks at Maria in surprise, collapses.

They fired for about half a minute, Maria Čarija, they fired fourteen bullets into you, ten of them into your poor head. At firing ranges the head carries most points, maybe that’s the explanation.

Now you’re lying motionless, you and Angelo, as though you’re playing dead. He with a hole in his chest, you, your face shattered, with no eyes.

Your eyes don’t sting anymore. Nothing hurts you anymore, Iroquois sister.

You don’t hear the buzzing of the horse flies. You don’t see that people have started approaching, sweating, dismayed, unbelieving.

“Death is certain, only its moment is uncertain,” said a Tibetan this morning on the TV. By chance, like. Just this morning, while Angelo was putting on his socks and cleaning his teeth, like every morning.

Maybe it was the Dalai Lama, thinks Angelo as he lies, shot.

What would the Dalai Lama say about Daniel, then? That he took matters into his own hands?

What a stupid random event, Angelo thinks as he lies, shot, and tries to feel with his fingers in the dust for his mouth organ. But it’s hard for his fingers to move; they’ll need several more springs before they sprout out of the grass and reach the instrument.

He had only wanted to put his instrument back in his pocket. Why on earth had she shot him?

The smoke cleared above the young man and the heads of men in cowboy hats approached.

“This is, probably, not hell, but it certainly isn’t paradise,” Angelo would say, if he could, as he lies with the hot metal in his flesh, and his bright red blood grows and steams on the cooling ground. Under the earth the dead occupiers are already getting out their little straws for the juice.

The world is an uncertain place. But before that uncertain place drips away through a dark speck, which is perhaps just a splinter in his eyes, Angelo sees another figure standing over him and recognizes the cowboy from the poster hanging in Rusty’s little room. As though he has come down from the wall: he’s wearing that same brown leather coat and the boots with the gleaming spurs, real gold.

He leans toward Angelo and stops his blood with his hands.

“Goddammit,” says the great cowboy from the poster.

Hey, the real Ned Montgomery, thinks Angelo. Why, this is brilliant. Let this be the last thing. A speck.